Valve Software, the company behind popular games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, and Portal, just made an interesting move by announcing the upcoming roll-out of Steam Cloud. In essence, it is a free extension that will allow any user of the wildly popular digital content platform to store game saves, mouse and keyboard configuration settings server-side, enabling gamers to access their data across multiple PCs.
So what will it actually do?
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 support, which had already been announced last May, will ship with Valve’s co-op zombie shooter Left 4 Dead demo later this week and the full game on November 18. It is expected to be compatible with all other Valve Steam releases (including the back catalog), and Valve has also been providing other game makers with the tools to make their own titles compatible.
Steam’s digital distribution service has often been dubbed the ‘iTunes for games’, as it provides a platform for buying games right off the virtual shelf. Google has been rumored to be interested in acquiring Valve before, but both companies have denied this formally.
Here’s the intro video for the upcoming Left4Dead game:
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I no longer buy games with SecuROM DRM (in any form) in them. I do however, actively buy games from Steam (except, of course, this with SecuROM).
Valve got things right, and they deserve my money.
EA and Ubisoft blundered, and the only way I would buy games from them anymore, is if I could pay with dog shit instead of dollars.
I keep hearing about cloud this or cloud that. Dumb question but is the advantage of a cloud just that you can essentially make it autoscale? How is it better than a traditional server? If you were building an app for example would Amazon’s E2 cloud be the best service to use to host your app?
That’s one advantage, but in this case the advantage is that your data live in the cloud - meaning that you personal settings, etc. can follow you from PC to PC.
There is a lot of buzz around Clouds and the term CloudComputing (CC).
Put in simple terms, CC is the next evolution of hosting and hence deals with anything where a service is provided remotely: hardware (virtual), software (Saas), Storage..etc.
The MAIN difference between a cloud and the legacy is:
1. Multi tenant - many users share the same platform
2. Elasticity - the platform scales dynamically on demand
3. Dynamic configuration through web ui - Admins can go home
4. Based on Web standards - Web, WebServices..etc
5. Business model: per usage basis
6. Cost - fully public
Anything that doesn’t follow these simple axioms is not a cloud.
Cheers,
Thanks you all rock…
One more, what is the deal with that force.com or whatever sales force is. Would it be better to use that or use amazon’s EC2 for hosting a Facebook app? Anyone know of a good blog which talks about hosting Facebook apps?
This is a great move by Valve! In fact, I didn’t know about the announcement, but have recently contemplated exactly such a thing. Deleting a game on Steam (its “local content”) left me wondering: “What about my savegames?”…extending into: “Why can’t I have those online as well? Automatically when I re-download a game I played I download my personalized data and savegames. Great stuff.
By the way, GOG (http://www.gog.com/ ) is a new digital distribution platform which focuses on a niche: those great old school games. I think these companies are great. In some cases I like to own the box and booklet of a game, but the recent years have made me reluctant to buy them boxed. We got high-speed internet, everything is within reach.. I hope more and more games will become digitally distributed. I won’t mention that “pirated games” are “distributed” this way as well.. so this addresses a kind of familiarity with gamers… some are used to downloading games…
Great news!!! Now I can install Steam from anywhere and play my stuff from anywhere (even at work oops).
maybe you can make it your job…
i think im gonna love this game. left4dead sounds cool.
The “Google buying Valve” story was an outright fabrication by The Inquirer’s Charlie Demerjian; anyone else who reported the story was the echo chamber at work.
I think is actually ironic that users accept this as such great improvement and the same ones have such a hard time understanding the benefits of being in the cloud in general!
Great post!
By showing something simple that makes a difference maybe people will have a better awareness of what’s Cloud Computing really about, in many ways.
Ps: I left a link about your post on my personal blog. Let me know it you’d like me have it removed and I’ll make sure to do it! Tks.