Valve Love The PC and Steamcloud
Wow…I have just read two fantastic pieces on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the first is a live-blogging of a mini-conference at Valve and the second is the more detailed roundup of the first piece. Boy is it clear that Valve love the PC as a platform and are willing to stand up and fight their corner.
Steamcloud, free weekends, game availability and much more are covered by John over on RPS so read on for the info!
Steamcloud is evidently the most interesting and exciting piece of news to come out of this Valve event. Steamcloud takes the idea of being able to play your Steam games anywhere and evolves it, big time. Steamcloud is going to provide save games, control configurations and pretty much any player controlled information is going to be available anywhere and anytime. This will start off with Half-Life and Left 4 Dead will also feature Steamcloud on launch. Imagine picking up Half-Life again in a few months time after getting distracted by Left 4 Dead and pick up from where you were on any PC. That is great.
Driver Auto-Updating and System Checking are two other big things to emerge. While information is still sparse right now basically Valve are going to include driver updates into Steam and include a system checking tool which will analyze your PC and recommend whether a game will be playable on your system or not.
Selling wise it emerges that Valve boss Gabe Newell is actively pursuing developers who do not make their games available worldwide and that they feel many are still nervous about Steam and its potential. Gabe and Jason Holtman are keen to see whole back catalogs of games appear on Steam if only they can convince developers it is a good idea. There are also plans to allow games to be bought in local currencies to bring improvements to the shopping cart and much more.
Those are just some of the key features I have picked out, read the RPS Live Blog and Full Overview for more details.
Tags: Steam, Steamcloud, They Love the PC!, Valve