Valve anounces Steam Cloud

Wow ... this is very big-brother kind of behaviour ... Valve unveiled new features planned for an upcoming Steam update, including automatic driver updates for hardware and an integrated system requirements checker for games. This new system is going to be huge. Not just for Steam users, but for the PC game community as a whole, especially if other companies opt to roll out their own "Steam Cloud" like system.

15.11. Valve are announcing Steamcloud. Save games and configs are to be stored by the Steam back-end. Half-Life will be the first to do this, with Counter-Strike remembering your key config. Left 4 Dead will ship with this too. I

f you're offline it caches the data locally, and then uploads it as soon as it can. They will keep those save games forever. "You can uninstall Half-Life, then come back to it two years later and finally finish Xen." It will be free, to both developers and customers.

Some more info can be found on ShackNews:

Half-Life and Half-Life 2 will be the first games to support the service. User key mappings will also be saved in Counter-Strike, and Left 4 Dead will ship with the feature. If players are offline, the service will store the data and then add it to the network on the next connection. According to Valve, saved games and configurations will be stored forever.

Valve further noted that the service will be freely available to developers, and is set to launch in the "near future."  The company also detailed plans for several new Steam systems, including a driver auto-updater and calendar functionality. Another feature in development is a system-requirement checker. The program will analyze your hardware and compare it to multiple games, estimating your performance and recommending upgrades.