Many non-gamers and casual gamers who've heard the cloud computing hype might be surprised to learn that the cloud is actually changing the way we play games. From the ever-evolving Steam and Impulse to upcoming services like OnLive, the cloud has already had a serious impact on the games industry, and with a slew of new services on tap for later this year and next, that impact is slated to grow enormously. This shift to the cloud has implications far beyond the gaming experience—every aspect of the multibillion dollar business of gaming will be affected, from distribution and sales to quality assurance to anti-piracy controls.

Steam releases the Cloud

The gaming world got its first major taste of cloud-based gaming on November 18, 2008. Alongside the release of the highly anticipated co-op zombie shooter, Left 4 Dead, developer Valve also rolled out a brand new service: Steam Cloud. This new service lets users store data such as saved games, multiplayer settings, and keyboard configurations on Valve's servers instead of locally on their own computer. What this meant for PC gamers was the ability to have the same gaming experience on multiple PCs. You could start right where you left off in a game even when on a different computer, and there was no need for constantly fussing about with gamepad or keyboard settings. Steam Cloud "just worked."

"For some time now, Steam has allowed gamers to log on from any computer in the world and access their applications," Valve president Gabe Newell said when the service was initially announced. "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."

This concept has been very well received by gamers—it was one of our favorite tech trends of 2008. In addition to Steam, cloud-based features have also been added to services like Stardock's Impulse platform, and, in all likelihood, the idea will become even more pervasive in the future.

"The concept of virtual storage is to let a player’s 'stuff' become ubiquitous—accessible from anywhere. This way, they don’t have to worry about a new machine losing their mods or saved games or other key data," Stardock CEO and president Brad Wardell told Ars. "I am pretty convinced that it is going to become the dominant way for games to deal with transient data. When implemented correctly—that is, store it locally in the event the user loses 'Net access or the service is down, and store it on the cloud when possible—you end up with a much better customer experience while decreasing the support costs for the developer."

Put away that gaming rig

One year after Valve popularized the concept of cloud gaming, a then-unknown start-up announced plans to take it in an entirely different direction. At the 2009 Game Developers Conference, a company called OnLive revealed a brand new service that would allow any TV, PC, or Mac access to "the world's highest performance Games On Demand service." All you need is access to a broadband Internet connection and, if you're using the service on a TV, you need what OnLive dubs the MicroConsole. The major benefit of OnLive for consumers is that, in theory, it allows players with modest hardware to access more demanding titles without having to upgrade—certainly a very appealing prospect.

OnLive has already garnered the support of a number of big-name publishers and developers, including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and Take-Two. The service could very well be as beneficial to those who make games as to those who play them. According to Onlive founder and CEO Steve Perlman, one of the major benefits is the piracy protection that cloud gaming provides, a subject which is currently on the minds of many PC developers.

"You can't pirate a videogame and you can't have used games, so that solves the piracy problem," he explained during a talk at Columbia University. "A movie you can always pirate, you can point a camera at the TV set, or a microphone at the speakers. But if the game is running remotely in the cloud, and it's playing here, you can't pirate it. Because every experience is unique."

This is surely an attractive proposition for many publishers, who have struggled with finding ways to curb PC gaming piracy. However, for some developers, the anti-piracy features aren't what makes OnLive so attractive. Instead, it's more of a sense of curiosity about what this type of service could mean for the future gaming.

"The guys at OnLive made it really easy for us—we didn't have to do anything to our game, it just worked on their service," Ron Carmel, one half of World of Goo developer 2D Boy told Ars. 2D Boy is one of the few independent developers (if not the only one) that has partnered with OnLive. "We were also very curious to see how well the service works, and having a game on there and getting sales and usage data is the best view an outsider can get."

However, while World of Goo has infamously been subject to a great deal of piracy, Carmel says that piracy had no impact on the developer's decision to partner with OnLive. Instead, he pointed to a much different benefit, one that is especially poignant for smaller developers like 2D Boy who have limited resources.

"The most obvious one is beta testing," he told Ars. "As a developer you could beta test your game on a cloud computing solution without risking a leak, and knowing that all your testers are always using the latest version. Another huge advantage is that all of the game's inputs and outputs can be recorded, so when someone reports a bug or a crash happens, you can go back and see exactly what happened. Reproducing bugs is often the most difficult and time consuming part of fixing them, and being able to replay a bug would significantly speed up the bug fixing process that dominates the end of every game's development cycle."

Of course the major question is, does OnLive actually work. The prospect certainly shows quite a bit of promise, but is the technology there yet? While we won't know for certain until it actually launches on June 17, early reports from beta testers suggest that there are a number of technological hurdles that OnLive hasn't been able to overcome, with at least one person who got unauthorized access to the beta test claiming that the lag and graphical issues rendered games "simply unplayable." (In its defense, OnLive counters that this person was way too far away from the servers, and that the service will be targeted at specific geographies to combat this problem.) The service has also been criticized for its pricing structure. OnLive will cost users a $14.95 monthly fee, in addition to the costs of purchasing and renting games.

Similar to OnLive is L.A.-based OTOY, which makes use of AMD's Fusion Render Cloud GPU/CPU server platform. Combined with OTOY's own cloud streaming tech, the service wants to deliver an OnLive-style experience, albeit on any Internet-capable device. "These [AMD Fusion Render Cloud] servers will permit content providers to deliver video games, PC applications and other graphically-intensive applications through the Internet 'cloud' to virtually any type of mobile device with a web browser in a manner designed to help maximize battery life and to efficiently process the content," the company claims.

To demonstrate this, the company showed off a version of Crysis—a visually intense first person shooter often deemed the benchmark for high-end computer graphics—running on an iPhone. And, aside from the obvious control issues, it worked.

In fact, Ars Deputy Editor Jon Stokes came away from the demo much more impressed by the games streaming on the iPhone than those on a larger monitor. Games like BioShock and World of Warcraft showed plenty of compression artifacts on full-sized monitors, so much so that in-game text was almost unreadable. However, when viewed on the smaller screen of an iPhone, these graphical issues weren't as apparent.

This could potentially make OTOY very appealing to more casual, less discerning gamers, though the graphical and lag issues will probably turn off the more hardcore. The service is expected to make its public debut in Q2 2010.