Il y a six mois, Valve annonçait Steam Cloud, une suite logicielle intégrée à leur offre Steamworks qui… ah, trève de jargon : Steam Cloud stockera automatiquement sur le net, sans quota et gratuitement, votre profil et votre configuration de jeu (souris, clavier, paramètres multi, tags). Ce qui vous permettra de la retrouver automatiquement si vous vous loggez sur une autre machine. Si vous modifiez la config sur la deuxième machine, ce sera automatiquement synchronisé.
Valve vient d’annoncer que le premier jeu à profiter de Steam Cloud sera Left 4 Dead, et ce dès sa sortie. Le service sera ensuite mis à jour pour stocker sauvegardes, screenshots, vidéos, commentaires audio… Fin septembre, au festival du jeu vidéo, l’envoyé de Valve faisait encore semblant de ne pas savoir ce qu’était Steam Cloud. Ah le sagouin, il avait bien caché son jeu!
Toujours est-il que si ça fonctionne, Valve aura réussi un coup magnifique. D’autant que le service sera accessible à tout développeur utilisant Steamworks, le toolkit gratuit de Valve. Valve promet par ailleurs que tous ses jeux seront à terme également compatibles avec Steam Cloud.
Le communiqué de presse:[–SUITE–]
STEAM CLOUD ROLLING IN THIS WEEK
Leading Online Platform for PC Games Extends Portability
November 3, 2008 – Valve, creators of best-selling entertainment products and advanced technologies, today announced the roll out of Steam Cloud, a set of services for Steam that stores application data online and allows user experiences to be consistent from any PC. Steam Cloud is a free extension to Steam, a leading a platform for PC games with over 15 million accounts worldwide.
Steam Cloud support will ship with Valve’s Left 4 Dead demo later this week and the full game on November 18. In this first release, the information stored and accessible through the Steam Cloud includes keyboard, mouse, and gamepad configurations, as well as multiplayer settings such as spraypaint images.
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 will be available to all publishers and developers using Steam, free of charge, and Valve will add Cloud support to its back catalog of Steam games. Cloud services are compatible with games purchased via Steam, at retail, and other digital outlets.
« 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. »
For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com
