Enlarge / Steam Deck’s head is in the clouds—and thanks to Dynamic Cloud Sync, that’s a good thing. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
As Valve’s first portable PC, the Steam Deck, approaches its estimated February launch, the back-end work to translate third-party PC games to a Switch-like form factor has ramped up considerably. While we expected to see the Steam ecosystem get updates for things like improved Linux support and Deck-compatible store flags, a surprise Monday announcement confirmed a cool feature that nobody necessarily saw coming: a major change to Steam’s support for save files in the cloud.
Dynamic Cloud Sync is now live on the Steam platform, and it’s a first for any gaming platform currently in operation. It appears to be inspired by a specific use case: playing your favorite PC game on the go via Steam Deck, then resuming that same game later on your home PC. That concept sounds well and good, but in practice, it requires the logistical step of making sure your game is saved and then uploading that save to the cloud. The idea of tapping through menus, saving, quitting, and watching your device upload a save to the cloud isn’t necessarily compatible with the pick-up-and-go nature of a portable console.
In a statement on its official Steam Community site, Valve all but call out the Nintendo Switch by name in addressing this issue:
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