Huge news coming out of Valve in the wake of a press event held on Thursday. A feature many of us dreamed about but never thought would happen is coming, Steam Cloud will allow saved progress, game settings and other user data to be stored “in the cloud” so that game progress can be resumed on any PC.
I have multiple PCs at multiple locations and have always found it hard to continue playing through the same game on all systems because save game management is a nightmare. This addition to Steamworks completely solves it by uploading user data to Valve and then downloading that same data when you connect on another system.
The added benefit of this is of course that you won’t need to worry about backing up save data either. I’m sure many of us have been in the situation where upon formatting a PC’s hard drive and reinstalling Windows the realisation sets in that those saves were not backed up.
The feature will be rolled out to existing Valve titles such as Half-Life and Half-Life 2 soon. Titles such as Counter-Strike will have the feature added at a later date and the upcoming Left 4 Dead will ship with it from day one.
[via Next-Gen]
There are a couple of new releases on Steam today for those who haven’t yet got around to playing halflife in its other incarnations:
If you havent played Half-life you really don’t know what you’re missing, so now is a great time to jump on the bandwagon, with these sets saving you up to $25 (~£13) on the price to buy them separately.
This week’s highly informative and always entertaing GFW Radio (mp3 link) features an interview with Stardock CEO Brad Wardell. Towards the end of the podcast the crew get into the details of Stardock’s approach to digital distribution and as one of Steam’s main competitors Wardell gives his candid thoughts on Valve’s service. He says there was strong customer demand for them to put their products up on Steam but was reluctant to side with valve due to their 30% cut and his general ambivalence towards what could be become the “Wallmart of digital distribution”.
Wardell goes on to say that Stardock are attempting to produce a viable alternative to Steam so that there is more choice on the market. Stardock’s new Impulse service will support persisant worlds and newer business models than what is current available as well as providing functionality similar to Steamworks such as match making and community features. Wardell states “I don’t think you are going to see Half-Life on Impulse real soon….and probablly you won’t see Sins of a Solar Empire on Steam anytime soon.” Interesting interview.
