Gamasutra was present at a Valve-hosted press event held yesterday in Seattle. The topic was digital distribution, and Gamasutra reported on a wide range of details regarding the future of Valve's Steam service, and on its game-saving feature Steam Cloud in particular.
According to the Gamasutra report, Steam Cloud will allow players to access all sorts of information pertaining to the games they play on Steam from any Steam-enabled PC, such as game-generated data like game saves and keybindings. What this means is that players will be able to begin a game of, say, Half-Life 2 on one machine, and pick up where the left off on another, with all their keybindings and configuration data intact. According to the Gamasutra report, all of this information will be stored on Valve's servers, and there is no upper limit to the amount of data a player can save.
There is currently no set release date for Steam Cloud more precise than "the near future," but Valve did mention that only its own games will see this functionality during its initial rollout. As with all other Steam functionality, developers will have to implement Steam Cloud into their own games.
Among the other upcoming features planned for Steam are auto-driver updates and system requirement checks for individual games. Valve is also planning to flesh out the Steam Community by adding RVSP and calendar functionality. Support for developer-created communities is also in the works.
We'll report more information on Steam Cloud, as well as the future of Valve's download service, as it becomes available.
