Valve announces Steam Cloud

By Oli Welsh Published 30 May, 2008

Remote storage of all your save games.

At a conference on Steam and the future of PC gaming at its Seattle headquarters today, Valve announced that it would be introducing a new feature to its digital distribution platform that allows remote storage of all game data for Steam games.

Steam already allows you to play any games in your Steam library from any PC. Steam Cloud will extend that service to game data - examples given were a progress save from Half-Life, or your keyboard bindings and option settings from Team Fortress 2.

All such data will be automatically saved to back-end servers, accessible from any PC, and kept forever at no cost to the player, or the developer of the game. There will be no quota or storage restrictions of any kind; even video replays and screenshots can be stored as part of the Steam Cloud.

In practice, this means that you can uninstall a Steam game halfway through, delete all save files, and resume it years later on another PC, exactly where you left off.

The first games to offer Steam Cloud support will be the Half-Life series, CounterStrike and Team Fortress 2, and forthcoming co-op shooter Left 4 Dead. Steam Cloud will be available as part of the Steamworks set of developer tools.

Steam developer John Cook also mention a slew of other updates to the Steam platform that Valve plans for the near future: auto-updating of your computer's device drivers, social features including events and calendar systems, 'official' community pages for games, pricing localised to your country's currency, Amazon-style recommendations and shopping cart systems, and more payment options.

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About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (26) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Cyclone #1 4 years ago

    Excellent news. A couple of months ago I lost my Portal and Episodes 2 saves to a hard drive failure (I hadn't backed up in a few weeks). An excellent second line of defense as well as a handier way of transferring save data between different computers.

  • haveasafeday #2 4 years ago

    Yeah that is quality news, very convenient.

    I like the name too for some reason..

  • rprince #3 4 years ago

    Finally. Why does it take so long to do obvious things like this?

  • Mudo #4 4 years ago

    Better things to do, mostly.

  • Farfarer #5 4 years ago

    I've been wondering if/when they'd get around to this.

    Great news.

  • urban #6 4 years ago

    finally!

  • SeesThroughAll #7 4 years ago

    Keep that as a backup method, and it certainly shall be innovative and useful.

  • ChrisOTR #8 4 years ago

    Great news, and good to see Steam still improving rather than Valve resting on their laurels.

    That said, it again highlights for me just how network-aware and Steam-dependent these games are. I have the same concern with it that I have with iTunes- what happens to my DRM-locked music or games when the company disappears, or more likely, moves on to bigger things in years to come? And, for the naysayers, consider the recent MSN Music debacle. It *can* happen!

    I wasn't worried when my Steam investment was just 1 or 2 games, but it's starting to get to be a sizeable amount of money.

    I want to pay for my games, but say no to DRM!
    Edited by 2 at 30/05/08 @ 02:46

  • makeamazing #9 4 years ago

    Saving online is a great idea. Hopefully they have the money and the technology to back it up. But its a great idea, I do backup my save games now and again, but this is so much a more sensible proposition (as long as there servers dont crash and lose the data).

  • asphaltcowboy #10 4 years ago

    Amazing! Just what I need!

  • christourlord #11 4 years ago

    Great!

    In a year, we will take this for granted, but it really is an excellent idea.

  • Kostabi #12 4 years ago

    Quite possibly the greatest idea since digital distribution.

  • Hypercube #13 4 years ago

    It would be interesting to see their policy on data mining for this kind of information. With possibly thousands of saved games to look through, would it allow them to run analysis of how players are actually playing their games? I know with HL2 they have lots of data about how many people finished the game and how long it took etc.

    Could access to all these saved games give developers a real insight into how the public play their products?

  • zoidberg #14 4 years ago

    this is GENIOUS...

    you could've done it anyways through some hosting, but now, it's facilitated through Steam. Great minds there at Valve.

    EDIT: @Christ OTR, you can run Steam in offline mode and play all your games. Technically, even if it goes bust (which I SERIOUSLY doubt), the games will still be playable... also, you can BACKUP game files (so as not to re-download them later) so there would be little need for Steam-online if and when giant overlords take Valve for questioning as to why they're providing such good games for Earthicons that don't appreciate them...

    /kiss Valve's ass mode off.
    Edited by 1 at 30/05/08 @ 10:14

  • AphoticCosmos #15 4 years ago

    Holy christ.

    I've always supported Steam from a personal point of view, and frankly this is the first step to utter domination of the digital distribution market.

    Excellent news!

  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #16 4 years ago

    I spent all of Half Life 2 emailing my savegames back and forth between home and work, so this is a welcome feature for me...

    ... except my new job doesn't let me play games at lunchtimes. Bugger.

  • Lemming81 #17 4 years ago

    I'm a huge Steam/Valve advocate but I can't see myself ever using this as If I'm on an entirely new PC often enough to warrant it, I still wouldn't be looking forward to redownloading the gigs and gigs of games I have Steam, just to play.

  • Oceadge #18 4 years ago

    I don't like the sound of "pricing localised to your country's currency". It's nice to be charged the same as the Americans on Steam right now. Shame if they start charging us more.

  • symmetry #19 4 years ago

    I wuv u valve!

  • hiddenranbir #20 4 years ago

    Localised pricing?

    Please, Valve...no....

    If you do that I no longer get digital distribution as the cheaper alternative!

  • mcbain23 #21 4 years ago

    nice - no more self-hatred for forgetting to copy game saves to USB key when going from work to home PCs..

  • YourMessageHere #22 4 years ago

    You forgot to mention the bit about the integrated system requirements checker, EG, which is silly as that's an even better idea than online saves.

    What a fantastic idea. Now all we have to do is wait for EA to buy Valve, rebrand Steam as EA SteamLinx or something, and fuck it all into a cocked hat.

  • ChthonicEcho #23 4 years ago

    "pricing localised to your country's currency" NO!

    Localised pricing? Please, Valve...no.... If you do that I no longer get digital distribution as the cheaper alternative!

    The price will be converted to your currency. The price itself won't change.

    GG, Valve.

  • Sar #24 4 years ago

    Valve are fucking gods.

    Seriously, they do the sort of shit other devs wouldn't or couldn't even dream of.

    Just think of the storage space something like this would take up even after a couple of months, never mind years! And all for free to the customers and developers?

    I'll say it again, they're gods of the Dev world.

  • lordvitriol #25 4 years ago

    Great. Now all that's left is _real_ broadband for everyone, Valve start with movies and manga/comics, a pink skin, sane pricing so the russians can buy more than one game a year.

  • Tap2 #26 4 years ago

    Hi all, What I find strange is that noone compares the brilliance of Valve's handling of all this, with e.g. EA's atrocious behaviour.
    I've quite a few Valve games, and like them all, but I love the Battlefield franchise, so I'm playing those games despite the fact that EA games decided that electronic downloads are something you get once, and if you need to reinstall them again more than half a year later, you can't get the files from their servers. You had better have saved the install files you got when buying the game (and that isn't made all that clear when you buy the game).
    Also, updates are handled in a decidedly worse way, and their anti-cheat system stinks. It's called Punkbuster, it's something they apparently have bought off a 3rd party company, and it kicks people who don't cheat, while leaving some cheat behaviour unpunished.
    I could go on, but I think you get my drift. The only reason I still play anything from EA, is that I really enjoy DICE's Battlefield games.

    So, in retrospect, I was really worried when I started reading about Steam, when we first heard about it, but none of those fears have turned into reality. They even handle the statistics about our gaming rigs in a way which magically doesn't feel intrusive (that's magic to me, considering what's happening all over the "real world", cf. US and EU surveillance/anti-piracy/anti-terrorism legislation - really impressive!)
    Kudos to Valve. That's all I have to say, unless you want me to wax even more ridiculously long-windedly eloquent. :D