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Any PC gamer who's suffered harddrive failure, motherboard failure, or just plain old backlight failure has probably cursed their inability to transfer their saved data to another computer. Luckily, Valve has heard these anguished cries.

Speaking at a Thursday press event in Bellevue, Washington (as reported by Next Gen), Valve revealed Steam Cloud, a new update to Valve's popular Steam service that enables gamers to access save data and keyboard configurations for their games from any PC. In addition, Steam will soon include localized pricing, recommendations, driver auto-updating, and a system requirements-checker, as well as officially-supported communities. Valve has also recently announced Steamworks, a suite of publishing tools that publishers and developers can obtain free of charge.

Speaking on why Valve has been working so hard to increase Steam's feature set, business director Jason Holtman said that the service has achieved 191 percent year-on-year growth and 1.25 million peak concurrent users. Meanwhile, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell pointed to the perception problem that the PC faces, largely due to the lack of NPD tracking of subscription-based games and digital download. "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 said.

No date has been set for Steam Cloud's release, but the new features it provides will be rolled out in existing titles. The service will be available for free to both developers and gamers.