Valve Announces Steam Cloud

Today, Valve announced a new addition to their Steam platform: Steam Cloud. The premise is simply an online service that will keep saved games and configuration files tied to your Steam account, allowing you to install and play your games on any machine, right where you left off. Probably the most promising is the promise that the company will open the service to developers, so other games will be able to take advantage of its features. This feature is something I’ve personally wanted from Steam for a long time. It means that your save file will always be safe in case data becomes corrupt or unrecoverable, and it’s one less thing to beat myself up about after I forget to backup my saved games for a Windows reinstall.

The company also shed light on other features they plan to include, an auto-update feature for drivers, a calendar feature, and a system-requirement checker, similar to Vista’s implementation, which will scan for your hardware and recommend upgrades based on multiple games.

Half-Life and Half-Life 2 will be the first games to support the service. User key mappings will also be saved in Counter-Strike, and Left 4 Dead will ship with the feature.

If players are offline, the service will store the data and then add it to the network on the next connection. According to Valve, saved games and configurations will be stored forever.