Valve has recently announced that its Steam service will soon utilize it’s new Steam Cloud Online Network. What does this mean? First of all, many people don’t even know what Steam is. Steam is a free downloadable game hub that offers features seen on Microsoft’s Xbox Live. You can purchase games online for download for anywhere from $3.99 – $49.99. Steam includes all sorts of genres as you would expect from PC games. There are tons of games for casual gamers who just want to play cards as well as tons of shooters for the more elite players.

Steam includes an instant messaging service as well as a voice chat service that runs over any game played through Steam. This service notifies you when your friends are online and what game they are currently playing. You can also point Steam to games you have previously purchased to include these features. Multi-player games can be hosted through Steam and made available to other Steam subscribers. Additionally, all your games purchased through Steam receive automatic updates. A really nice feature is once you purchase a game on one PC, you can access this game on a friends or one in a cyber cafe. As with Xbox live, game achievements can be gained through certain games. Also there is a free demo for practically every game available on steam.

So what is Steam Cloud? Steam Cloud will add the ability to save your games on their servers. So if you started playing a puzzle game on your PC, you can quit and resume on a different PC, like at work (on your lunch break of course). Steam Cloud will also store any configuration settings you have attached to your account. Personally, I use the Xbox 360 controller on most of my Steam games. I’m hoping Steam Cloud will remember controller set ups as well. Steam Cloud will also include a system requirement checker. This will analyze your PC and estimate it’s performance.

Many PC gamers might have given Steam a go when it first launched and my have been disappointed. I urge you to give Steam another chance. It has long grown and evolved in to something very beautiful that could perhaps revive the thrill of PC gaming.

Tags: Steam, Valve

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under PC Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.