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    Steam

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    A digital distribution service owned by Valve Corporation. Originally created to distribute Valve's own games, Steam has since become the de facto standard for digital distribution of PC games.

    Would You Pay For Steam Cloud?

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    alistercat

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    #1  Edited By alistercat

    Steamworks is an amazing deal for both consumers and publishers. Valve has done a great job offering things like Steam Cloud and achievements to their service. For many reasons, however, not every game can adopt Steamworks. That doesn't help the fact that I am tired of backing up save files for my games, and having to remember the directories that they are stored (seriously, this should be standardised by now). The cloud solves these problems, but like I said, it isn't included with every game. Microsoft and Sony have it.

    I would love to see valve sell (for a low price) a subscription based cloud storage that can pull saves from any game. While I can get this on my consoles I don't need it. It is less of an issue of keeping saves across multiple PCs, and more of a vault to lock away my progress when I don't want a game installed any more, so I can come back to it later without having to manually backup. As something entirely optional and not affecting the games themselves, I think this would be a good idea for a small portion of the market.

    Or free, whatever. I just want the option.

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    Doctorchimp

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    #2  Edited By Doctorchimp

    Yes

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    shiftymagician

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    #3  Edited By shiftymagician

    So long as they don't force it on everyone if a fee is required (unlikely given their current track record), yea this would be a neat idea for those who want the luxury.

    EDIT: To answer the thread title specifically, no I wouldn't pay for it as I wouldn't need it or even think the feature is worth my dollars. I have no issue with managing my saves personally.

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    jetsetwillie

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    #4  Edited By jetsetwillie

    no. im entitled to everything for free and get pissed off and shout if i don't.

    just joking. yeah id pay for a good cloud service. shame these thing have to be splintered up between companies. id like to just have one 'cloud' for everything

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    penguindust

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    #5  Edited By penguindust

    Nah, I don't need it. If they want to give to me for free it's there, but I don't purposely use it and I'm not going to pay for something I don't use.

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    bicycleham

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    #6  Edited By bicycleham

    Why would I pay for anything if I had the choice?

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    Vexxan

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    #7  Edited By Vexxan

    If I play more games on PC I probably would for such a service. It's great to know your stuff are always safe when the PC crash hits ya.

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    spazmaster666

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    #8  Edited By spazmaster666

    As someone who regularly plays steam games on multiple PCs, I do like Steam Cloud but I also have Drop Box which takes care of any game saves for games that are not supported by Steam Cloud.

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    Sooty

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    #9  Edited By Sooty

    @Vexxan said:

    If I play more games on PC I probably would for such a service. It's great to know your stuff are always safe when the PC crash hits ya.

    Why not just put that money towards an external hard drive that does a system image every week? (or sooner if you're really paranoid)

    Don't really see the point in paying for Steam Cloud, only if I switched between games on both PC and laptop often, and I mean really often. Otherwise there's no point, rather have everything on my PC safe than just game saves which don't really mean a lot in the long run. I'd rather lose my Skyrim saves than 40GB of music, a lot of it FLAC which was hard to find.

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    BisonHero

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    #10  Edited By BisonHero

    I'd be willing to pay a very small fee for it, since hey, server storage isn't free. Companies have to buy that storage.

    However, a free feature I'd love to see Valve implement is to force all Steam games to use the same directory for save files (in the Steam folder, in your documents folder, wherever) and just have subfolders within that directory for each game. This would mean that when I plan to reformat my hard drive (or buy a new one), I wouldn't have to go through the nightmare of tracking down the save files for a couple dozen different games.

    That feature would actually be of even greater use to me than cloud saves, since I never play games on any computer but my own. I never use Steam Cloud to transfer my saves to different computers, and all it really does for me is make it slightly easier to back up my data when I am reformatting my hard drive or I have a brand new hard drive.

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    Sooty

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    #11  Edited By Sooty

    @BisonHero said:

    However, a free feature I'd love to see Valve implement is to force all Steam games to use the same directory for save files (in the Steam folder, in your documents folder, wherever) and just have subfolders within that directory for each game. This would mean that when I plan to reformat my hard drive (or buy a new one), I wouldn't have to go through the nightmare of tracking down the save files for a couple dozen different games.

    YES! I hate how games often save wherever they like, not following a single pattern, like this:

    No Caption Provided

    Why Singularity chose to not save into My Games, I do not know.

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    Vexxan

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    #12  Edited By Vexxan

    @Sooty said:

    @Vexxan said:

    If I play more games on PC I probably would for such a service. It's great to know your stuff are always safe when the PC crash hits ya.

    Why not just put that money towards an external hard drive that does a system image every week? (or sooner if you're really paranoid)

    Don't really see the point in paying for Steam Cloud, only if I switched between games on both PC and laptop often, and I mean really often. Otherwise there's no point, rather have everything on my PC safe than just game saves which don't really mean a lot in the long run. I'd rather lose my Skyrim saves than 40GB of music, a lot of it FLAC which was hard to find.

    Yeah, I know an external hard drive is one way to go with but due to bad experience with external hard drives within family/friend circles I only trust the cloud to store my most important data.

    Not sure if my game saves should be classified as 'my most important data' thou...maybe they shouldn't. Oh well, I still think I would like to have it all stored somewhere else so I know shit can't go wrong.

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    Sooty

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    #13  Edited By Sooty

    @Vexxan said:

    @Sooty said:

    @Vexxan said:

    If I play more games on PC I probably would for such a service. It's great to know your stuff are always safe when the PC crash hits ya.

    Why not just put that money towards an external hard drive that does a system image every week? (or sooner if you're really paranoid)

    Don't really see the point in paying for Steam Cloud, only if I switched between games on both PC and laptop often, and I mean really often. Otherwise there's no point, rather have everything on my PC safe than just game saves which don't really mean a lot in the long run. I'd rather lose my Skyrim saves than 40GB of music, a lot of it FLAC which was hard to find.

    Yeah, I know an external hard drive is one way to go with but due to bad experience with external hard drives within family/friend circles I only trust the cloud to store my most important data.

    Not sure if my game saves should be classified as 'my most important data' thou...maybe they shouldn't. Oh well, I still think I would like to have it all stored somewhere else so I know shit can't go wrong.

    I just find safety in knowing it is very very very unlikely both my hard drive and external would fail at the same time, my main problem with cloud storage is I don't think you can do full restores from system images, or even create system images, they are really cool. When my hard drive died last year I just bought a new one then wrote the system image onto it and it was like nothing had changed, I lost a few days worth of stuff but that wasn't anything major. Didn't even take that long as well.

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    mortface

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    #14  Edited By mortface

    I'd love to be able to sync saves between my PC and my laptop. I've been trying to get Steam to send savegames to a Dropbox folder by way of a symbolic link, but I haven't got that working yet. In principle I think it should work, though.

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    JoeyRavn

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    #15  Edited By JoeyRavn

    Meh, not really. I don't find myself revisiting a game after finishing it and uninstalling it. The way Steam Cloud works nowadays is more than fine for my needs. And for the very few games that, in my case, may benefit from it, Steam Cloud is not practical at all. Skyrim, for example. Have you seen the size of your saved games folder? Mine was +3GB after 100 hours.

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    deactivated-63f899c29358e

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    That would be a nice feature to have, but I wouldn't pay for it since I don't think I would ever have any need for it.

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    Justin258

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    #17  Edited By Justin258

    No.

    Not because it's a bad idea - it isn't - but because I don't need it at all. I've got flash drives for that sort of thing, if I really need to transport saves. Plus I'm cheap.

    But, hey, if you are willing to pay for Cloud saves then more power to you.

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    tmthomsen

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    #18  Edited By tmthomsen

    It's up to the individual developers to implement Steam Cloud - not Valve. I remember reading that all Steam users have 1 MB of cloud storage space per game by default, but special deals can be made between developers and Valve if their games require more space.

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    Ravenlight

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    #19  Edited By Ravenlight

    It's already free. It would just piss people off if they changed or added a paid variant.

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    misterhaan

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    #20  Edited By misterhaan

    i like to keep all my saves, even if i'm probably never going to play the game again. the crazy thing is some games (like serious sam hd) use steam cloud but don't sync your saves!

    i wouldn't pay for steam cloud to keep doing what it's doing or to support more games because i could just do a little research and write my own program to back up my saves for me. oh wait, i already did! well, mostly — still have that automation thing to do.

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    Shivoa

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    #21  Edited By Shivoa

    It's free (to me, the customer) for any developer who wants to integrate it into their product on Steam so I don't think it'd be a great idea to switch around and start charging for Steam Cloud.

    It sounds like you actually want a remote storage/sync solution for your non-Steam Powered games. MS SkyDrive has 5GB of sync space (and they're tightening the integration with Win8 etc) last time I checked and there are plenty of others offering sync clients and free space in the cloud. Just point them at your save locations and let them do their magic.

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    crusader8463

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    #22  Edited By crusader8463

    No. I have zero use for it. Plus, there is no way they could force every developer to put it in all their games.

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    louiedog

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    #23  Edited By louiedog

    @Shivoa said:

    It sounds like you actually want a remote storage/sync solution for your non-Steam Powered games. MS SkyDrive has 5GB of sync space (and they're tightening the integration with Win8 etc) last time I checked and there are plenty of others offering sync clients and free space in the cloud. Just point them at your save locations and let them do their magic.

    Basically this.

    I use Dropbox with symbolic links. What symbolic links do is basically link one file/directory to two different locations. So the same file essentially has locations in c:\fighting game\saves\ and c:\dropbox\gamesaves\fighting game\saves. You can create these manually, with a utility, or for this instance I recommend using GameSave Manager. It keeps a database of games and where their saves are located. It will detect them on your hard drive and set it all up automatically with your Dropbox folder. If you have a game that it doesn't know you can just tell it where the save it located yourself.

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    MikkaQ

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    #24  Edited By MikkaQ

    Hell yeah, when you have 200+ steam games installed, backing up saves gets complicated. I could finally reformat without worrying.

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    bananaz

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    #25  Edited By bananaz

    I don't even know what it does. My saves don't matter that much to me. After a certain amount of time, I'll start over instead of loading.

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    Scrawnto

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    #26  Edited By Scrawnto

    The problem is, Steam can't make that a thing. They aren't going to hunt down all the saves scattered across your harddrive and back them up for you. They literally couldn't. That's why they have the Steamworks API, so that the developers of the games can implement that functionality in a standardized way. Otherwise, Steam would have to be allowed to make and modify folders and files all over your computer, in your documents folder, etc, with profiles set up for each individual game's peculiar save behavior. It would be a mess. The current system is better. They just need more developers to opt into it. Charging for it would be a mistake, since not everyone would use it, meaning that it wouldn't be worth developers' time to implement.

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    Bourbon_Warrior

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    #27  Edited By Bourbon_Warrior

    I pay Steam enough money, they should do this for free, I mean they even do mods for Skyrim now they can do this.

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    morningstar

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    #28  Edited By morningstar

    I might. Depends very much on the price though.

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    deactivated-65f0b21bb6a1a

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    Sure, if I had the money to spare.

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    deactivated-589cf9e3c287e

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    @AlisterCat: I am of the opinion that any game coming out in 2012 should have steamworks. For older games, dropbox paired with GameSave Manager is a bearable alternative.

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    wookie912

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    #31  Edited By wookie912

    i just want steamcloud support for skyrim please....

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    Nekroskop

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    #32  Edited By Nekroskop

    No. I've given them enough with the 150 games I own. Besides, backing up saves is fun, right guys?

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    prestonhedges

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    #33  Edited By prestonhedges

    Every time I see one of these threads I imagine it's someone who works for said company and is doing some focus testing.

    Also, no. Wouldn't use/need it, and it'd be a ridiculous thing to pay money for.

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    GS_Dan

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    #34  Edited By GS_Dan

    Nope, it's cool to have though.

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    nintendoeats

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    #35  Edited By nintendoeats

    I would pay not more than 50 cents a month.

    Having my JC2 save everywhere is handy, but it doesn't matter enough to spend real money on.

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    spiceninja

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    #36  Edited By spiceninja

    Don't give them any ideas, god damn it!

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    krazy_kyle

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    #37  Edited By krazy_kyle

    No. It's not too difficult to copy save files onto a memory stick anyway/

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