The rumors were true: Steam is reaching for the clouds. Steam Cloud Play was confirmed to enter beta earlier today. And interestingly enough, the first service supporting Valve’s latest venture is Nvidia’s GeForce Now.
Does this mean that all your Steam games can be played on the cloud? Not exactly. Developers how to choose to opt-in the games they wish to have available on the service. Valve published documentation over at the Steamworks page explaining how to do just that. Players, on the other hand, will need to create a GeForce Now account, download the client, and connect their Steam library. Naturally, in order for this all to work, you’ll have to both own the supported game on Steam, and may need to subscribe to GeForce Now. Membership for the latter starts at $4.99 USD a month.
“These cloud services enable Steam users to play their Steam library in the cloud, one game at a time, like they can on their local PC,” reads the document. “Developers must manually opt-in the games they wish to make available on GeForce NOW.”
Will the Steam partnership help Nvidia with its GeForce Now woes?
If not now, when
Due to the limitations of GeForce Now, not everyone will be able to use Steam Cloud Play during beta. GeForce Now is available only in select countries, preventing many Steam users from being able to stream their games.
However, it doesn’t appear Valve will stop with Nvidia. On the contrary, GeForce Now support only seems to be the first stepping stone. In the documentation, Valve writes that, to opt-in, developers will be presented a choice of services hosted by Valve. Currently only GeForce Now is available, but it makes sense to assume that more options will be available during or after the beta. Valve itself may offer its own service in due time.
