Cloud Descends On Steam News

Two weeks ahead of Left 4 Dead's scheduled release on Valve's Steam service, the publisher has announced a helpful Steam Cloud service that allows players to store game playing preferences across titles they've downloaded on the Steam service.

Steam Cloud is set to ship for free with Left 4 Dead and will initially store in-game preferences such as keyboard, mouse, and gamepad configurations. The application will also store details such as multiplayer settings including spraypaint images.

Valve is currently working to apply Steam Cloud to the back-catalogue of games on Steam, while the application will be available to all publishers offering game download's on the service. It will also be compatible with other titles purchased at retail and via other digital download services.

"For some time now, Steam has allowed gamers to log on from any computer in the world and access their applications. This also makes it easy to upgrade a PC without worrying about losing your games," said Gabe Newell, President and Co-Founder of Valve. "Steam Cloud is a natural extension of the portability Steam affords gamers and developers, and we intend to expand its feature set as it is used in Left 4 Dead and other games coming to Steam."
 
Your settings and game preferences are synched to the Steam Cloud and can be accessed remotely, so it will even be possible to access Cloud settings from different PCs. Any changes made to your setup are then saved to the Steam Cloud automatically.

With over 15 million registered accounts worldwide, Steam is the premier digital download service for PC games.