steam-cloud posts

If you love taking screenshots but find them to be a pain while using Steam, there might be some good news. A new beta client for Valve's PC game download service has a new way to both take and organize game screenshots. Once you select the "beta participation" option you will be able to download the beta client.

The Steam message boards have the details of how the screenshot feature works. Basically you can press the F12 key to take a screenshot of any PC games you own via Steam that are DirectX 9 or higher (older games that use DirectX 8 or below are not yet supported). After exiting the game, any screenshots that you take are automatically uploaded to the Steam Cloud service. You can also post any of those screenshots to your Steam Community Page.

Other new features in this beta version include adding a password strength meter when you want to change your Steam password, a microphone voice input change from 11khz to 16 khz and a voice output change from 8khz to 16khz.

[Via Blue's News]

The Steam PC/Mac game download service has now surpassed the 30 million active user mark, according to a new press release from its owner Valve today. While Valve is notorious for keeping specifics about the numbers of games sold on Steam to itself, today it revealed that it has seen sales growth of over 200 percent in the last 12 months via Steam.

Valve also revealed that it has recorded a 178 percent growth in Steam user accounts over the past 12 months. Over six million users access Steam each day, according to Valve, with peak simultaneous users going over the three million mark. In order to meet the increased demand, Valve has improved Steam's infrastructure to run at 400 Gps. Steam now has over 1,200 games in its library. Over 200 of them use Valve's Steamworks game development tools (Steam achievements, matchmaking, Steam Cloud, etc). Over 100 million save files now use the Steam Cloud service.

As promised on Tuesday Valve has now released the long awaited Mac port of their 2004 first person shooter classic Half-Life 2 via their Steam client In addition Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2 have also been released for the Mac. Also, both the PC and Mac ports of Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 finally include Steam achievements for the first time and sport some graphical improvements based on the latest Source Engine (which Episode 2 already has). Finally all three games now support Steam Cloud which allows players to save games online and use them on any PC with a Steam client.

To celebrate all three games get a big 30 percent off sale for a limited time. Half-Life 2 is now priced at just $6.99 while Episodes 1 and 2 are on sale for $5.59 each. Finally The Orange Box which has Half-Life 2, Episodes 1 and 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 (coming to the Mac "soon) is priced at $20.99

While GDC 2010 is over with, some things that were introduced in the conference are coming to light. One of them is a new online PDF brocheru for Valve's Steamworks game development tools that reveals a couple of new features that were not previously announced. One big one is new support for in-game microtransactions. Steamworks has now been upgraded to allow developers to use the tools to support such transactions. Players can now purchase in-game items within their Steam account.

Valve has also upgrades their Steam Cloud feature to allow for 100MB of data to be stored in the server per game (previously the storage capacity was a mere 1MB). There also also some interesting Steam stats in the PDF including the fact that there are 20 petabytes of data delivered via Steam each month (which, if you are unfamiliar with "petabytes" , is a lot. Look it up).

The development team at DiezelPower seems to update their zombie action game Nation Red about as much as Valve updates Team Fortress 2. This week yet another new update was delivered to its players via Steam and as usual it adds quite a bit to the title.

The big new addition in this latest patch is the Steam Cloud feature which will allow Nation Red owners to store their save games, profiles and custom settings via a remote server and use them on any PC that has Steam installed. Some new achievements have also been added to the game. There's also been a change in how to unlock weapons. All weapons are now put into classes. Each class will unlock after a certain amount of time has passed with some random unlocking.

If you are one of those folks who spent some money on a pre-order for Left 4 Dead via Steam or at your local retailer you may have been like us this morning; waiting for the demo of Valve's co-op zombie shooter to unlock and be ready to play. Valve didn't disappoint and we've spent more than a few minutes trying out the demo in both single player and co-op modes.

The demo has the first two maps of the introductory mission, No Mercy, which are available in straight single player with AI buddies or in co-op mode for you and three live players (the Versus mode, where you can also play as one of the zombie boss characters, is not included in the demo release). A video intro introduces us to the setting in a bare minimal way; the four human characters are fighting the rest of the world which has been infected with the zombie plague two weeks earlier. There's no back story here; no reason why the plague happened and no hint as to why these four characters are together. It's just jump in, move from point A to B and shoot anything other than your teammates. (you can download the video intro right here at Big Download).

Valve's Steam service just release a new update to its client software today. The update has a number of additions for users of Valve's game download service including a way to purchase games via the Steam web site rather than just using the Steam client. There's also new backend support for matchmaking for the upcoming release of Left 4 Dead and for Steam Cloud.

But in a surprise move, Valve has also announced that to celebrate the release of the new Steam client they are putting the acclaimed music-racing game Audiosurf on sale for just $2.49. That's 75 percent off its usual price of $9.99. The reduction is for one week only so if you haven't tried this terrific game you will likely not see a price as small as this to grab it.

Back in May, Valve announced plans to launch Steam Cloud, a new feature for their Steam download service that would allow gamers to store save games, system configurations and more on Valve's Steam servers. We haven't heard much about this since then but today Valve announced that the upcoming demo and full game for their upcoming zombie shooter Left 4 Dead would be the first game to support some Steam Cloud features.

The demo, which will go live on Nov. 6 for Left 4 Dead pre-orders, will include ways for players to store "keyboard, mouse, and gamepad configurations, as well as multiplayer settings such as spraypaint images" onto Steam servers. If you switch to another PC and sign onto your Steam account these settings should still be there. Save game settings are apparently not supported yet. Valve will add Steam Cloud support to their older games over time and it's also freely available to any other game developer or publisher to use.

Last month Valve head honcho Gabe Newell invited a bunch of journalists from around the globe to their HQ in Seattle. Part of the reason was to hype Steam Cloud, their service for remote storage of game data. But there was another reason. They wanted to spread the word far and wide that the PC is the gaming platform of the future. Period. Dot. Exclamation point.

He was quick to point out that the big guns like Intel and Microsoft should be the ones trumpeting the greatness of the PC, not companies like his, Blizzard or GameTap. It's no secret that Newell doesn't much care for the whole Games for Windows concept, or rather Microsoft's apparent lack of promotion and backing for their own initiative. Perhaps it was Newell's goading that made Microsoft respond as they did yesterday in San Francisco.

Following the announcement of their free Steam Cloud service yesterday, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell spoke about the confidence he had in the Steam service overtaking retail in sales. According to Newell, Steam has grown by a smashing 200 percent, compared to the retail's traditional spurt of ten percent.

Steam "will actually pass over in the next three months, how much of our business is coming from retail versus how much is coming from other channels," Newell told Eurogamer.

In addition to believing that Steam will boost industry sales as a whole, Newell also believes the service has prevented -- and will continue to prevent -- a great deal of PC software piracy. "We've got great facilities that make it very hard for people to pirate ... It's a dangerous thing to pirate one of our games because later on, when we catch you, you lose all your games, or you can't play multiplayer."