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The Value of Save Games
May 30, 2008 4:10 pm
In the future, you’ll be able to store saves for your Steam games on Valve’s servers.
I don’t know how often people play the sort of games they’d want to save on multiple machines — in other words, narrative games as opposed to multiplayer. I can understand burning some time at a friend’s house with a fast game of Some Multiplayer Shooter, but I don’t think I want to sit down and pick up a story where I left off. Narrative games would seem to lend themselves to longer and less social sessions.
But since Valve knows what you’re doing all the time, they must know how often people play the same narrative game on multiple machines, so maybe they see some demand.
Or … maybe there’s another reason. What can they data mine out of save games that they don’t already know? They already know how far you’ve gotten — if that’s what “Highest Map Played” means. There must be something interesting in there …
Richard Slater wrote:
I can see a strong case for the multi-player data for a game such as Call of Duty 4 to be made more portable. non MMO games are borrowing from the MMO world by providing character progression, this data is only stored in a local file (certainly for CoD4, I don’t know about other games).
Of course the opportunities to exploit this data are wide and varied, it would also make the assumption that the data is being stored in some useful format. CoD4’s encrypted binary stream it uses to store character progression would pose some serious issues indexing the data efficiently.
Posted on 30-May-08 at 5:23 pm | Permalink
Jojo wrote:
I know I’ll get a lot of use out of this feature. Being in the industry, most of us here have machines that are capable of gaming and when a new game hits, we often want to play a half-hour or hour’s worth on our lunch break. It will be great not to have to cart save games back and forth via flash drive.
Posted on 30-May-08 at 7:01 pm | Permalink
Vargen wrote:
I’m visiting my folks for a few days. One of my old computers is upstairs, and if I could hop on and pick up my Half-Life 2 save off Steam then I might play it a bit. It’s certainly a nice feature to have.
And Steam needs all of the nice features it can get; since you’re not actually buying a physical copy of the game any more, they need to make up for that lost value in some other way. The level of data portability that they provide is a good step towards making up for some of that lost value. Adding save games in on top of what they already do helps strengthen that.
Posted on 31-May-08 at 11:53 am | Permalink
charlequin wrote:
My friends and I can’t possibly be unique. Most of us tend to lean at least somewhat in the introverted direction and often are interested in mixing low-impact social time with other activities. Stuff like “hey, I’m working on a paper/have to clean the kitchen/am knitting a giant hat, why don’t you bring your PS2 memory card over and get to work on FFXII?” is pretty common for us. So to me, the Steam Cloud thing seems to immediately meet a real need.
Posted on 31-May-08 at 12:54 pm | Permalink