The upcoming Valve Steam Deck will get an exciting new cloud saving feature that will allow gamers to seamlessly jump between their Steam Deck console and PC without losing any progress. In a recent blog post, Valve followed up on its previous announcement by providing more details on the feature and giving it an official name — Dynamic Cloud Sync.
According to Valve, it will ensure that all modified save data is uploaded to the cloud before the Steam Deck goes into sleep mode, meaning that you’ll be able to pick up right where you left off on PC without needing to close the game on the handheld console.
The feature will be free to use, though it may be a while before it hits some of the best Steam games given that developers will need to manually integrate it into their titles. And even when it does become widely available, users will still need to enable it for each individual game through Steamworks settings.
Apart from requiring a consistent Internet connection, there doesn’t seem to be a reason not to opt into using Dynamic Cloud Sync wherever possible. However, even if you decide against it, you’ll still be able to carry over progress between your Steam Deck and PC, though you’ll need to first save the game on your handheld console and close it completely before continuing on a computer.
The Steam Deck was originally due to launch in December last year, but the big day was pushed back to February 2022 due to the ongoing chip shortage and unexpectedly high demand. Still, from what we’ve heard, Dynamic Cloud Sync sounds like it could well be one of the handheld console’s defining features.
The portable console is expected to make PC gaming on-the-go easily accessible. Powered by Valve’s own SteamOS as well as custom hardware from AMD, the Steam Deck is even tipped to be powerful enough to run Microsoft’s latest operating system Windows 11, as well as a wide collection of PC games.
Valve has also recently begun reviewing its entire gaming library for full Steam Deck compatibility, ranking each game as "Verified, Playable, Unsupported or Unknown." So far, only 86 games have received ratings, though we expect many more will follow ahead of and after the Steam Deck finally launches. As it stands, popular games such as Hades, Psychonauts 2, Death Stranding and Dark Souls 3 have already been categorized as "Verified," so rest assured that plenty more will follow. It seems to track, as developers are now telling the press that porting games over to Steam Deck has been easy, and that the system runs their games surprisingly well.
