Letting Off a Steam Cloud from the Valve
By Azam on November 4, 2008 
Valve, creators of best-selling entertainment products and advanced technologies 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.
Valve is the company behind popular games titles like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, and Portal. Also, Valve delivers leading technology for gaming industry with Steam and now with SteamCloud. Valve plans to use the online platform service to give players a convenient storage repository for player-created game footage and screenshots, and to automatically download driver updates when detected. Valve is creating a set of tools for other gaming publishers to take advantage of the gaming platform.
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 spray paint 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.”
Reading List
TechCrunch Is That Steam in the Cloud
Ars Technica Valve to Release Steam Cloud
Valve is set to Launch Left 4 Dead
See Intro Video Below
Categories : Media & Ads
Tags : Counter Strike, Day of Defeat, Gabe Newell, Half Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, Steam, SteamCloud, Team Fortress, Valve