PSN Ascends to the Clouds

Sony Computer Entertainment had surprised their loyal fans today with a pretty majestic piece of news that came ever so subtly as suspicions were confirmed and great news it was.

Its been kind of interesting to watch Sony over the last year as to what they have next for their black behemoth. If you recall back to E3, Valves Gabe Newell came out on stage, said many things and all, with a grin on his face. He talked about working with Sony and the PlayStation, he talked about Portal 2 coming to the PlayStation 3 and he also talked about Steam and how Steam would work with Sony's baby. He had mentioned Steam-Cloud and everyone became pretty excited. The fact that Steam would be part of the Valve experience on the PlayStation 3 seemed to be an even bigger piece of news than Portal hitting the PlayStation. What had also surfaced before E3 last year, were suspicions of a cloud-based save system for some upcoming Xbox LIVE! Gold competitor on Sony's platform. Well, those speculations are at an end, and rumor is no longer fiction, but is fact.

Sony today announced that beginning tomorrow, the PlayStation 3 would be receiving an update allowing Cloud-Saving services. This means that all PlayStation Plus subscribers will be receiving and alloted 150MB storage space and up to 1000 saves in the clouds. This includes games that you wouldn't normally be able to copy. Now, game saves don't really take up that much space, so what's the big deal with this? Its copy-protected game saves you're able to back-up and go anywhere you want.

The update is confirmed to take place tomorrow 10 March 2011 and when downloaded, can be accessed from the GAME section of the XMB under your saves folder. It wasn't mentioned as to whether non-subscribers would be seeing this update to their console or not and it was also mentioned that not all games support this necessarily.

However, the Gaming Gods have heard the plea's of their subjects and have made life a little easier and maybe, may have begun something that could lead up to the functionality of the NGP that could be announced at E3 or later this year. Regardless, we can check another off the list and continue to hope for Cross Game Chat.