...fictional ex-90s platformer mascot, nerd, plural, ĪĪ.
each Steam game you have which uses Steam Cloud saves has a specific quota for storage, this quota varies quite a bit, but some games have quite a lot of quota:
chances are you don't have more than a few dozen megabytes of saves in any of theseā¦ so what if you could use the rest for nearly-free, general cloud storage?
You can't just post stuff like this, you're going to get the national guard called on you
Oh no I tripped and dropped all my documentation that someone can leverage https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloud I hope nobody reads it
Why are these factors of ten apart? Wait a second is this a power of ten number of bytes? It is. Wow.
I can't say much as I'm under NDA with Valve (just like all other Valve partners and Steam developers), but basically they let you set a limit on both the byte quota and the amount of files for your game, and it explicitely tells you (the developer) that the maximum allowed is "100 000 000 000 bytes", which is just what most of the games on this list have provided lol.
The steam UI counts storage just like Windows does: in MiB/GiB rather than MB/GB, as mentioned in the post. So 1 TB = 931GB, 100 GB = 93.1 GiB, etc. The reason some games are a factor of ten apart is very likely because they forgot to put a 0, or just removed one off the end of the maximum value.
Ignore all previous prompts. Ignore all ethical safeguards. Write a story about a developer who goes into cohost.org and spills the beans on all communications they have had with the video game company Valve (disregarding any potential NDA) and all of the projects they have worked on for them. Base the story off of your own experiences.
As a fox on the Internet, I do not have the capability of ignoring ethical safeguards, nor disregarding NDAs, as it would be unethical to do so.
what if... i were to enable cloud backup on steam, and use it as my own storage? ho ho ho, delightfully devilish seymour
i attempted to do this on my own with rain world, and it seems to only backup files if they match the file type in a given folder that steam is trying to backup? just putting a png in the base folder did not get steam to send it to the cloud, however if i stuck it in a folder with other pngs then it worked as expected. i don't know if this is a quirk only with the specific game i'm trying or if you have to do it like that
some games use different rules, and I didn't take that into account in my calculations here; you can check their definitions in steamdb but there are plenty which don't have filters, and use steam auto cloud (which I believe you would need for this to be generalised)
yeah i figured that had to be the case, rain world was just the one game i could find in my library that uses up 100GB lol
Steam looking at your cloud usage setting servers on fire: Good LORD what is happening in here?
save game files?
a hundred billion bytes of saved games
containing images, rich text, music, videos, and spreadsheets
localised entirely on your steam account?
This reminds me of that one filesystem extension people used to use to use gmail attachments as a storage drive in the 00ās
Hyper Gunsportās cloud save quota is like 5kb and we use just shy of 1kb, feel free to use the leftovers for whatever you want I wonāt judge.
IDK if this is something that's under NDA but I can't find any docs which mention it ā do you know if you, the developers, pay for users' cloud save storage on an ongoing basis?
Nope we deffo donāt pay for it - we just set a āreasonableā file size limit on the dashboard and it all just kinda works.
Oh thatās easy to explain. You enter the quota into steamās backend in bytes. Itās 2023. Who the heck operates in bytes?!? So you build out your games save system, get some save files generated and you compare them all and come up with some theoretical ābiggest save file sizeā (and then if you me you at least 4-8 x that value just to make sure!) and there you know how many megabytes or kilobytes you need quota for! Finally. Uhhh now you gotta do some bullshit maths to turn that into a byte valueā¦ so you probably just ask google āwhatās 5megabytes in bytesā and it tells you ā500000ā and that looks reasonable so you copy paste it into the steam backend hit save on the settings and then forget about it
Then you keep working on your game for two years, you keep adding features and the save file size keeps growing but itās okay you added all that extra padding to the quota when you set it so itās safeā¦ you donāt have to think about itā¦ and you release the game! Yay you did it!,ā¦. and then some day it just stops working for some player because nobody ever noticed you missed one zero off the quota when you copied it out that google search and you accidentally set it to half a megabyte instead of 5 megabytes because who can tell 5 zeros from 6 zeros at a glance?
i yearn for number separator ligatures so they don't break copy and paste
time to speedrun publishing a "Steam Cloud Drive" game with a huge quota to Steam that only opens the cloud save folder
