Valve Adds Dynamic Cloud Sync to Steam for Seamless Game Saves

pcmag.com:

Valve added Dynamic Cloud Sync to Steam this week, which allows a player to switch from playing a game on one device to another without any loss of progress.

With the first shipments of Steam Deck scheduled for next month, Valve is clearly keen to ensure the experience of switching from the Deck to a PC and back again is as seamless as possible. Dynamic Cloud Sync allows that to happen by removing the need to worry about exiting a game before moving to a different gaming device.

As Valve explains, "We anticipate that users will frequently suspend their Steam Deck without exiting the game, as is common with other hand-held gaming devices. With Dynamic Cloud Sync, if they then choose to play on another device (whether a PC or another Steam Deck), their progress will be there waiting for them."

Using the cloud, save data is handled automatically for your Steam account and any devices associated with it. So if your Steam Deck needs recharging, but you don't want to stop playing, you can just pick the game up right where you left off on a desktop PC or laptop.

The only thing that may prevent you from taking advantage of Dynamic Cloud Sync is a lack of support in the game being played. Valve requires developers to manually enable the feature in each game using Steamworks and some new APIs. Once enabled, a new build of a game needs to be released, which should trigger an update for each player. After that, automatic save synchronization should work in the background by default.

Valve delayed the launch of Steam Deck by two months due to component shortages, but the delay has turned out to be a positive. Not only are we getting this new save sync feature, but the size of SteamOS has been reduced to 10GB (it was 24GB), the