Steam cloud gaming/streaming

[Macro]

I tried to see if anyone had come up with this before but couldnt find much on the topic.

So was wondering if steam had thought about offering their own steam based streaming service? I know that there is CloudLift, but Onlive does not seem to be in the best position financially nor does it have a massive collection of games available. There is also Nvidia grid but there is no public statement as to when PC support is coming and if they would support steam games etc.

So I was wondering with the advent of cloud based gpu processing it would theoretically be easy enough for steam to farm out the processing to an existing infrastructure provider, then just charge some form of subscription through stream to be able to play you games via a cloud GPU rather than via your own computer.

They have already made leaps in this direction with in home streaming, which is a great step, however I personally (I know not everyone will agree) would rather just get rid of the need of having my own gaming pc to play the games. This is also one problem with adoption of such a service, I am sure a large portion of gamers want to keep their super ace PC, and let them if they have a gaming powerhouse, but it would be another great offering for the platform which can bring certain people to the platform who may not have a gaming PC, so this would lead to more sales from people who play on laptops and maybe even allow you to enter in the tablet gaming market etc as you can stream the output to whatever then.

Although I am not sure if (from a financal perspective) this may conflict with the steam system? however as cloud based GPU can be provided as an "on demand" service you can only pay for what you use so its not like Steam would need to spend millions on infrastructure and ongoing maintanance, they just pay for the GPU time and maybe even hook it into the Steam system/console.

Anyway I know that I would happily pay/subscribe to a service which lets me play *most* of my steam games at a decent quality (not fussed about top end settings), also like I say provides more value to the steam platform generally.

[Macro]

I do both, I have successfully played a lot of quick paced games like PUBG (well as successful as you can be on that), DOTA 2, Warframe, Payday, Dirt Rally etc. I have also played a lot of RTS games and general indie games over both local and cloud based gaming services.

For the most part there is not much noticeable difference, on the cloud gaming servers occasionally I may get some artifacting but generally input lag is not noticeable, and I play over Wifi too in the UK where our internet infrastructure is managed by pigeons who fly each byte to and from a data centre.

I appreciate a lot of people will immediately dislike the idea of not having their own pc, and a lot of people will immediately start throwing their arms up saying IT WONT WORK THE LATENCY WILL KILL IT but most of those people will not have tried it. Its like when I ask my Son if he wants some of my Tuna Mayo sandwich, I know full well he likes them, and would enjoy it, but he is just stubborn and says no.

So anyway there is a growing market for this, its not for everyone, but *could* be for more of you than you think, if you give it a go, tech is only going to get better in this field as time goes by, and also some nice side effects of having your game streamed means you can easily just plug a controller into your phone or tablet and boom you just got yourself a mobile gaming PC.

Would play Resident Evil 7 on my phone in the dark at night again 10/10