Steam Cloud Announced

[CSN NewsBot]

While the name might raise a few eyebrows, the premise behind Valve's "Steam Cloud" will certainly lead to some standing ovations. As part of the RPS live blog feed from Valve, the "Steam Cloud" system will handle configurations and save files across multiple computers!

Save games and configs are to be stored by the Steam back-end. Half-Life will be the first to do this, with Counter-Strike remembering your key config. Left 4 Dead will ship with this too.



If you’re offline it caches the data locally, and then uploads it as soon as it can. They will keep those save games forever. "You can uninstall Half-Life, then come back to it two years later and finally finish Xen."



It will be free, to both developers and customers.

This new system is going to be huge. Not just for Steam users, but for the PC game community as a whole, especially if other companies opt to roll out their own "Steam Cloud" like system.

[AzN_PrOPh3t]

Nice. Finally when I beat HL1 and HL2, I can just retrieve the save files instead of having to freaking beat it again (for the 3rd freaking time).

[meowmeow]

Valve.. you amaze me. You truly, truly do.

[mad1]

Awesome Valve. This will surely save a lot of time when reinstalling games.

[ALT+F4]

Really? Really? You really don't know how to save that stuff on your own? And what if you don't WANT your information stored away somewhere FOREVER?



SCREW THAT.



Along with diabolical new DRM schemes this sounds like the ground floor of a horrible, horrible nightmare.

[Zips]

Nobody once ever said you can't still save them locally. Furthermore, you're thinking permanent saves that you don't have to worry about are a bad thing?



Paranoia is running wild already.

[Admz]

yay i wont have to bind a million commands over and over and over again!

[Kotae]

o_O@ the one comment. yeah, that one.



But anyways. I wish most games had this ability. :v I would've loved tohave been able to retrieve my saves for Neverwinter.. and this'd be amazing to have for my steam games when I lost them when my hd shit itself.



But now it is here and I am happy. glorius.

[_Shorty]

Glad they liked my suggestion.

[Thortok2000]

Meh, Doesn't half life 1 source already do that?



Every time I download and play, my 'autosave' is always the final boss. It's write-protected or something, even I wanna start over, it doesn't autosave. =/ Even switching to a new computer, deleting my entire steam folder, etc. etc., didn't help. All levels unlocked, and the last autosave of the game unable to be overwritten. It's like in the gcf or whatever.



Meh. =/

[debman3]

AT LEAST !!! gagaga, i never finished bioshock because everytime i got to play it from the beggining :F i always have to re-do my cfg when i go in a cyber cofee to play CS ... GNIIii

[sathanas]

I hope you can opt out, cause I know I'm such a quicksave ho, and if it's uploading a save as often as I make them on my 256k up... An option to "put this save on Steam Cloud" when you make a proper save would be good though.



Whatever the case though, it's always good to see Steam expanding.

[Zips]

No game on Steam presently does this.



And I'm sure they have something in place for people who save every 10 seconds. It's probably uploaded after X amount of time or when you're exiting the game.

[InfectedSoul]

This is absolutely one of the best features they are adding to steam (that I've heard of so far, knowing valve im sure there are more goodies in store for us, we just dont know it yet) Almost half excited to have to reinstall a game after this comes live, just to enjoy not having to do nothing before playing

[kalabalana]

I made this suggestion years ago, glad to see it's being implemented.

Essentially the system should work by saving your config files, and landmark saves with the option of adding specific user unique saves to the cloud. Or if Valve takes a more active choice, saving the most up to date save on the cloud. (I doubt all saves will be kept, just completion point saves, like chapters in HL2)



The system will only be noticed by people who use it, if you're not using it, and nobody told you about it, you prob won't know it exists. Anyone who's against the idea is clearly an idiot, or not smart enough to understand the concept.