[ascagnel_]

> But the publishers looked at it like Nvidia had stolen their games to make their own bootleg streaming service.

nVidia was preloading games onto their service without licenses, and so they needed publisher approvals to do this. There are other cloud services that offer a gaming-capable PC and block storage and don't run afoul of this, since you need to install the games yourself.

[kmeisthax]

This seems like a distinction without a difference. Them preloading game files shouldn't matter, because the actual games still require a DRM license in order to work.

It's broadly legal to run caching proxies, remote-hosted DVRs, and shared/deduplicated cloud storage. There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?

[ascagnel_]

> Them preloading game files shouldn't matter, because the actual games still require a DRM license in order to work.

> There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?

The difference is that Valve, as part of their distribution agreement that publishers and developers sign to list on Steam, claims the right to host and distribute the files. Preloading the files is important, because it's a differentiation of the service -- you're not renting a PC in the cloud, you're signing on to a service where all your games are just sitting there, without your input, already patched and ready to go.