Valve has an odd way of getting the news about big developments out into the open. At a recent press event, with around seven journalists in attendance, Gabe Newell spoke about PC gaming and announced an exciting new feature for Steam. You see, your personal computer may become the least important part of your PC gaming experience. Steam Cloud hopes to keep everything from your purchased games, to your saved game files and control configurations, on a central server so you can log onto your account from anywhere and pick up exactly where you left off; you won’t even have to invert your mouse. 

Valve’s plan for Steam doesn’t lack ambition; the company wants as many games as humanly possible on the service, and they want as many developers as possible taking advantage of what the platform offers. These seem like lofty goals, but it’s also hard to argue with the steps being taken to achieve them. The Steamworks SDK allows developers to drop Steam and its benefits into games quickly and easily, and hardly a week goes by without news of more games being added to the service. The independent title Audiosurf was a big hit at last year’s Game Developers Conference, and became a surprise hit on the service.

The social aspects of Steam are also well-implemented, creating the Xbox Live-type experience on the PC that Microsoft desperately wanted, and failed to deliver. Even worse for the competition, Steam is free and, with a wide user-base of entrenched PC gamers, it’s going to be hard to compete with the service. The growing pains seem to be over.

While all these developments make sense, the Steam Cloud announcement doesn’t appear part of the rather linear growth of features Steam has already enjoyed. The SDK helps developers get on board, the social networking and cross-game invitation system creates gamer loyalty, but how many people have ever wanted to play Half-Life 2 at a friend’s house? The obvious winners will be LAN centers, whose users will now be able to play their own games seamlessly, but that’s a market that exists largely outside of North America. There is a demand to make content such as music and video portable to be used on multiple devices, but it’s hard to say how many serious PC gamers wish to sit down at locations away from their home to play their games. It’s a welcome feature, but it may not have the broad impact that Valve hopes. 

The Medic was the first TF2 class to see dramatic updates

What Steam does easily is allow games to evolve, and Valve’s Robin Walker told Next Generation that’s the direction that the company is moving towards. Team Fortress 2 is a game that launched with a smaller number of maps than most multiplayer games, but the title has seen a staggering 53 updates since launch. Valve is watching the community and making constant, small nudges to improve the game based on the constant feedback it receives. These updates add new content and change existing strategies, keeping the game fresh for players. This is an interesting blueprint for Valve: smaller games that both expand and focus on what players want as time goes on. 

No one in the PC gaming industry has ever tried to create something as ambitious as Steam, and Valve seems to want it all for its service. Blazing this trail means missteps and odd choices, and it’s possible that Steam Cloud may be more useful than it at first appears. What is clear is that Steam has done more things right than wrong, and PC gaming is changing with it.