Hey Valve, Here’s How You Can One-Up Your Competitors

Quite simply: take advantage of the current fascination with cloud gaming! At least one company promises fantastic gaming on practically any platform, with servers that take care of all the complicated hardware stuff in exchange for a monthly fee. All the user needs is a reasonably fast internet connection to receive a visual feed and control the pre-processed gaming experience without any significant latency loss. User input is sent to the server running the game, which updates the visuals to reflect what’s happening within the gaming world.

More than one person finds the scale of such an undertaking scary. What if say, over a hundred-thousand people want to play benchmarking-crown Crysis at the same time? Wouldn’t you need massive CPU and GPU computing power? Probably less than we think, and most likely not too much as to threaten Valve’s massive R&D and marketing budgets.

Valve already has the the user base (like over a million members?) and the resources to implement a cloud gaming service successfully. It’s a relatively simple matter of creating a server environment that works, then tying that into the current Steam ecosystem. Valve already practices cloud computing with Steam to a slight degree, allowing users to access restore their settings and even saved games from any computer they use, so why not roll out a large-scale implementation?

Imagine if there was no longer a need to download a game to start playing, since the game is already available on Valve’s servers; all you’d have to was log on and direct the service to load the game you plant to play. You’d also hear less complaints about games that simply do not want to run on a user’s particular computer, as presumably the servers would be configured to run Steam games properly.

The point is that if Valve can pull this off, they’ll be on the market for this much earlier than present and future competitors. And instead of coming out with optimistic PR snippets design to get the internets writing, they can just prove the concept by actually presenting a working service. Opp

What do you think? Should the Valve come up with its own cloud gaming service? If so, how much should it charge? How much are you willing to pay?