Valve puts saves and player identity online with Steamcloud

[RandomFool]

Valve announced its new Steamcloud service last night which will store Steam player data online, allowing gamers to access their save games, keyboard configurations, and any games they've purchased through Steam from anywhere in the universe. RPS attended the mini-press conference at Valve where Gabe Newell and company introduced Steamcloud and wanted to talk a little about all the negative press the PC games market has been getting.

Valve strongly believes that PC at retail is not doomed and explains that when the company holds free weekends for games on Steam, it results in stronger sales at retail; Newell jokes that retail must have some kind of magic. The company says that future innovations for Steam (beyond Steamcloud) include driver auto-updating and the continued expansion of the game catalog.

Link

This is pretty sweet. I've always wished that steam would have a way of transferring my config/saves from computer to computer since I tend to switch between my laptop and desktop pretty often.

 

[BassBomb]

OMG I LOVE IT!

Now I can play portal on my tv. Where before I was too lazy to transfer saves or re-beat it.

 

[MikeyLSU]

I like the idea of playing at a friends house and not having to remap the keys(I am not a default user)

 

[AMDZen]

This is why Valve > All other PC devs currently

 

[ShawnD1]

Why not just save as a single file, and ask where to save it each game session? That's how it works on Xbox 360. The game asks where to save the file, you select hard drive, then it saves to hard drive every time for that session.

For SimCity 3000, your save game was 1 file, and it was the name of the city. Taking your city with you meant copying that 1 file to a usb drive. Many games were like this in that saving your game as "shawn" meant making a file like shawn.sav and it would save in the savegames folder.

Valve is up to something. I don't think they would make a needlessly complicated system to solve a problem that literally did not exist 10 years ago.

 

[RandomFool]

The problem existed 10 years ago. I remember transporting my WC2 maps around on floppy disks. This makes it more convieint to use multiple PCs with Steam no floppies required.

Although now that you mention it, I hope there's some sort of profile system involved. My sister occasionally uses my account I wouldn't want her to overwrite all my saves if she decides to boot up portal sometime.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

How do I use it?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Wow. It seems they are definitely moving in the right direction for PC gaming.

(I so wish Guild Wars had the online character access that WoW has, so that I could view my characters when I'm not viewing the game)

 

[Czar]

Only thing that could go wrong is if they move graphics settings as well, I dont feel like trying to run my games with the same graphics settings on my laptop and on my desktop