Steamy News For Gamers

Back in March Valve Corp. announced the upcoming release of Steam Cloud, a series of services that allows gamers using the Steam platform to store game configuration settings in "the cloud". Well it's coming out just in time for the release of Left 4 Dead, Valve's new multiplayer zombie shooter.

This means that if you're like me and rarely use the default keyboard configuration you can upload your settings to the Steam Cloud and grab them any time you like. So if you buy a new PC or your game is really buggy and resets the config each time it crashes (I'm looking DIRECTLY at you Bioshock) or you're on your mate's PC or whatever, you can set everything to what you're comfortable with.

"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."

What would be really great is if games that share a common engine or common settings could import from another game. For example, imagine loading up Left 4 Dead for the first time and a prompt appears asking if you'd like to import your Half-Life 2 control settings.