Valve will be releasing the Steam Cloud services this week. For more information on Steam Cloud, check out Valve's press release below:

Valve, creators of best-selling entertainment products and advanced technologies, today announced the roll out of Steam Cloud, a set of services for Steam that stores application data online and allows user experiences to be consistent from any PC. Steam Cloud is a free extension to Steam, a leading a platform for PC games with over 15 million accounts worldwide.

Steam Cloud support will ship with Valve's Left 4 Dead demo later this week and the full game on November 18. In this first release, the information stored and accessible through the Steam Cloud includes keyboard, mouse, and gamepad configurations, as well as multiplayer settings such as spraypaint images.

The Steam Cloud will "just work," meaning any user changes to their game options will propagate to the Cloud by default. Upon logging into Steam from another PC, these settings will be brought down from the Cloud and automatically leveraged by the game. Any configuration changes on this second machine are then synced to the Cloud for future sessions.

Steam Cloud will be available to all publishers and developers using Steam, free of charge, and Valve will add Cloud support to its back catalog of Steam games. Cloud services are compatible with games purchased via Steam, at retail, and other digital outlets.

"For some time now, Steam has allowed gamers to log on from any computer in the world and access their applications. This also makes it easy to upgrade a PC without worrying about losing your games," said Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve. "Steam Cloud is a natural extension of the portability Steam affords gamers and developers, and we intend to expand its feature set as it is used in Left 4 Dead and other games coming to Steam."

A Steam client update is now available. To apply the update, click the File menu inside of Steam and then select "Check for Steam Client Updates...". The specific changes include:

Steam Client

• Added shopping cart, recommendations & purchasing directly on the web
  
• Added backend support for Left 4 Dead matchmaking
  
• Added backend support for Steam Cloud
  
• Updated localization for various languages
  
• Fixed Steam re-applying command line parameters (like -install) across 'change user' or 'change language' restarts
  
• Fixed Steam refreshing the games list, refreshing the server browser if open, and reloading server brower filter settings
  
• Fixed the friends list placeholder for large clans disappearing when "view online friends only" was turned on
  
• Fixed games list not always refreshing after receiving license updates
  
• Fixed embedded IE control not scrolling or responding to key presses correctly
  
• Improved IE control perf