14 DAY TRIAL // Valve is one of the most successful developers and publishers of games out there, with the likes of Half Life, Team Fortress, or Portal under its belt. However, a lot of the earnings of the company are due to its extremely popular digital content distribution service, Steam, which has over 15 million accounts worldwide.
The service allows players to download their favorite games, transactions that are saved to their accounts, and they are able to play the titles from anywhere around the world. Ever since its launch, Steam has gained a lot of popularity, becoming one of the most used online distribution services, with a portfolio of over 480 games from a wide variety of developers and publishers.
As Valve is a company best known for the great services it offers, it has been hard at work implementing a new feature into Steam. The addition, entitled Steam Cloud, will allow players to save their own customized settings for their games, and then access them anywhere they log into the Steam account. Options such as customized keyboard controls, or multiplayer settings, will be made available to users anytime they log on Steam, allowing an even greater mobility for players.
“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.”
A truly great addition that will surely make users even more attracted to Steam, the service will also be made available to developers for implementation into their already launched titles. This feature will be ready with the release of the demo of Valve's upcoming zombie shooter Left 4 Dead, which is scheduled for later this week.