Steam gets a new save feature

Wow.

There are truly gods amongst us.

OMG.

Dunno if it's posting at 6am that's doing it, but I just realised how big this could be.

Think about it - this service, being free and convenient, will take off, and quickly spread to other games. But it's not only that it's great to consumers - it's great to consumers with legit copies of the game. This could be a very clever, and very wise way of bringing down piracy levels.

I don't think that we'll ever reach to stage where users are penalised for not having an internet connection (at least until wireless internet is virtually everywhere, and virtually free). But this is a big step towards building a legal-only online community for singleplayer games. That's why I'm excited - innovations of this type are bringing more incentive for people to invest in SP games, which means developers are more likely to create great SP games, since there will be paying consumers.

It might seem minor to many people, but add enough incentives to stay legal, and piracy suddenly becomes a far less tempting option.

Hurrah for Valve!

btw, other announced news included some interesting TF2 tidbits: the next class to be given upgrades is the pyro, and the "meet the sniper" trailer is scheduled to be released alongside that update. I'm very excited: while I rarely play the sniper, he's an Aussie, and it's always cool to see ourselves represented, even in a whimsical, stereotypical, cartoony FPS.

^Well, the big deal is that there really isn't hassle anymore.

It's easy to download new and old games (quota issues aren't as big in the US, so that applies more there than here), games are easy to update, piracy is pretty well dealt with, and games are much cheaper to buy through Steam. Add to that the community, and you have a winner.

Furthermore, it's run by the people who brought us Portal/HL/TF etc, so it already has a library of the highest-quality games. And now there's new titles like Bioshock, CoD4 and UT3, so it's becoming a hub of PC gaming in general.

Before you go and say "more of a hassle than it's worth", you have to realise that games like Portal and HL could never be released without such an effective anti-piracy platform.

My bet is we'll see other big singleplayer titles like Fallout 3 moving to Steam, because it marries the very best concepts of console gaming (community, patches, achievements, support and now saving) with the flexibility of PC gaming. So yes, I would love to have Valve's babies, or at least adopt them until the relevant surgery becomes available.

Not when you could just download said program and pay $30 instead (I think that's the current price).

Of course, Steam isn't for everyone yet. But as internet connectivity becomes more prevalent, and piracy is a bigger problem for singleplayer games, the fact is that Steam is going to become one of the only ways to play singleplayer games on PC.

So like it or not, that's where it's heading. The reason we can be happy is that with these new features like Steam Cloud, that direction is a much more bright, positive and painless one.

Alot of people who don't use Steam much recently don't realise that it's changed for the better in the last 5 years or so. I use it for DMoMM, TF2 and Portal and I hardly even notice that it's there.

The only times it's visible are for updates, which are good, and when I bring up the steam community with shift+tab, which is an awesome feature. Being able to switch between games to find friends so easily is great. And Steam Cloud looks to cater more for the Singleplayer community, so there's something for everyone.

Now, if they secured quota-free game downloads, I would probably die of endorphin overdose.