Valve may have its own Google Stadia competitor after Steam Cloud Gaming references found

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Valve doesn’t look as if it’s got to sit by and let Google hog all the cloud gaming spotlight with Google Stadia. Some digging around by SteamDB in Steam’s developer portal has potentially unearthed Valve’s very own competitor – Steam Cloud Gaming.

There’s a GitHub repository which has been updated with several new elements pertaining to Steam Cloud Gaming for developers, including terms and conditions, online agreements, required fields, error messages, and all the back-end fraff which devs have to deal with.

It’s all a bit flaky for now but it does at least appear as if Valve is experimenting with the idea of cloud gaming through Steam. None of this has actually pushed out to the live version of the developer portal but in-roads are at least being mode.

As far as cloud gaming services go, Steam Cloud Gaming would, on paper at least, be a very fearsome competitor when compared to Google Stadia or Microsoft’s Project xCloud. The Steam games library is absolutely humongous compared to what the other two can offer anytime soon, provided it all actually became available on Steam Cloud Gaming by default.

It should also be said that Steam already has a very solid network infrastructure as well. It’s obviously not going to be near Google levels but Valve uses the Akamai content delivery network which has more than 216,000 servers in over 120 countries. Odds are, most people are going to be pretty near a Steam server, no matter where they are in the world.

While Google Stadia catches plenty of flak, would you be willing to give a cloud version of Steam games a shot?