Steam News: Steam Cloud Arriving This Week

Valve have today sent out a press release stating that their new system, called Steam Cloud, will be released some time this week. The system will save all of your configuration files and multiplayer sprays. Then in the future, they are planning on adding saving your saved games onto their servers. The news many have been waiting for, so take a look at the press release below:
Valve, creators of best-selling entertainment products and advanced technologies, today announced the roll out of Steam Cloud, a set of services for Steam that stores application data online and allows user experiences to be consistent from any PC. Steam Cloud is a free extension to Steam, a leading a platform for PC games with over 15 million accounts worldwide.

Steam Cloud support will ship with Valve's Left 4 Dead demo later this week and the full game on November 18. In this first release, the information stored and accessible through the Steam Cloud includes keyboard, mouse, and gamepad configurations, as well as multiplayer settings such as spraypaint images.

The Steam Cloud will "just work," meaning any user changes to their game options will propagate to the Cloud by default. Upon logging into Steam from another PC, these settings will be brought down from the Cloud and automatically leveraged by the game. Any configuration changes on this second machine are then synced to the Cloud for future sessions.

Steam Cloud will be available to all publishers and developers using Steam, free of charge, and Valve will add Cloud support to its back catalog of Steam games. Cloud services are compatible with games purchased via Steam, at retail, and other digital outlets.

"For some time now, Steam has allowed gamers to log on from any computer in the world and access their applications. This also makes it easy to upgrade a PC without worrying about losing your games," said Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve. "Steam Cloud is a natural extension of the portability Steam affords gamers and developers, and we intend to expand its feature set as it is used in Left 4 Dead and other games coming to Steam."

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.

Valve further noted that the service will be freely available to developers, and is set to launch in the "near future."

The company also detailed plans for several new Steam systems, including a driver auto-updater and calendar functionality.

Another feature in development is a system-requirement checker. The program will analyze your hardware and compare it to multiple games, estimating your performance and recommending upgrades.

Valve is also considering storing replay videos and kill-cam screens from games such as Team Fortress 2 and Day of Defeat: Source.

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