Gabe Newell on PC gaming; Steam Cloud to retain saves and configs across multiple PCs
No PC gaming crisis here
"Is there a crisis in PC gaming?" Newell asked during a presentation. "No. But there is a perception problem."
The reason PC backers say that there is a "perception problem" is partly because most of the time, particularly in North America with the monthly U.S.-only NPD retail reports, people aren't seeing the whole PC gaming picture.
In May, the NPD Group reported that online subscriptions alone generated $1 billion annually.
Newell said that in the next three months, its digital revenue from Valve titles will surpass its retail revenue.
"Only now are organizations such as NPD beginning to track alternative revenue streams (MMO subscriptions, etc.) and discovering billions of previously unacknowledged spending on PC gaming," Newell stated.
And many times, industry watchers focus on only the U.S. and U.K. PC gaming markets, Newell said, although customers in major European markets and emerging markets like China, Korea and Russia are almost solely dedicated to PC, leaving consoles by the wayside.
About PC Gaming Alliance
Asked during a Q&A session why Valve isn't part of the PC Gaming Alliance, he said, "Shipping products is more important than companies sending representatives together to all agree that PC games should be doing better.”
Newell also cited data from the Gartner Group that showed there are over 260 million online PC gamers in the world.
About Steam's new Features, and Steam Cloud
One of Valve's greatest innovations is Steam. Business director Jason Holtman said that Steam adoption is continuing to grow rapidly, with 191 percent year-on-year growth and 1.25 million peak concurrent users. The digital distribution and community platform houses over 300 PC titles from various game makers.
In the "near-future," Valve expects to add significant new features to Steam, including driver auto-updating, a system requirements-checker, new community calendar functions and "official" communities.
Other additions to Steam will be localized pricing (not just USD), recommendations, a shopping cart and more payment methods.
But perhaps the most compelling new feature, as far as convenience is concerned, will be the upcoming ability for users to access not only their Steam games from any PC (which they can do already), but also game-generated data such as saves and configurations, which will be stored transparently in Steam's back-end. This feature, dubbed Steam Cloud, will first be rolled out in existing titles, and will be available for free to both developers and gamers.
http://next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10711&Itemid=2&limit=1&limitstart=0
So, with Steam Cloud, we will be able to play games on different PC's with the same savegames and configs if we wish, hassle free ;)
And Steam grew almost 200% in just 1 one year, yowzers!
