Today, Valve has announced a platform that will store game applications online so that gamers can access them from any PC. Affectionately titled Steam Cloud, the November zombie thriller Left 4 Dead will ship with out-of-the-box support.

According to Valve, the Steam Cloud "just works," meaning that any changes a gamer makes to configurations in-game such as button layouts, difficulty settings, or multiplayer options will be automatically delegated to the user’s Steam Cloud account on another computer.

Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve, explains: "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. 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."

Want to spend the night at a friend’s house who still hasn’t experienced the magic of Portal? No problem--Steam Cloud’s got you covered. This is looking to be an extremely convenient service in that finally, Steam is truly portable. Here’s looking to its first inception, due out with the Left 4 Dead demo release later this week.