The cloud was a key driver in last year’s phenomenal PC video games sales. And, it is showing no signs of slowing down as more companies head to its direction. This booming space is also fast-becoming a battleground for startups and veterans alike.

Valve

Valve started 2012 strong with smartphone Steam app beta. The app permits users to access their social-gaming and delivery Steam service on both Android and iOS and purchase games from mobile phones, anytime and anywhere.

With expansion and improvements, many thought they are already setting up to battle gaming giants like Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation in the hardware division. The company immediately downplays possibility anytime soon. They shot down rumors of building a PC-as-console gaming and instead concentrate in strengthening UI.

Valve Marketing Director Doug Lombardi hinted on a new Steam interface that would target users who want to play on a PC connected to a television. He said,”We’re prepping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI and getting ready to ship that, so we’re building boxes to test that on. We’re also doing a bunch of different experiments with biometric feedback and stuff like that, which we’ve talked about a fair amount.

“All of that is stuff that we’re working on, but it’s a long way from Valve shipping any sort of hardware.”

Zynga

Virtual gaming magnate that saw success through Facebook would like to connect the world through games. The ambition will be backed by some serious technological skills and financial commitment. And, Zynga may just have those as they breathe a life into zCloud—which is poised compete with Facebook infrastructure. Whether they can win or not versus the largest social network in the world is loomed with uncertainty. But pushing forward with cloud may just be a good step for them.

The concept that runs zCloud was further discussed on Zynga’s developer blog:

“We learned to understand our workload, look into the black box of cloud computing, and built what we affectionately call zCloud, our own private cloud infrastructure. zCloud looks, feels, and operates similar to the way we use the public cloud, but allows for greater performance, scale and reliability. As infrastructure that is private to Zynga, zCloud physically resides in our own datacenters and is designed specifically for social games in terms of availability, network connectivity, server processing power and storage throughput. zCloud – from proof of concept in our labs to supporting its first games – took less than 6 months.”

Numecent

A dark horse of the playground could be Numecent. A novice based in California has just revealed cloupaging—a technology that can significantly reduce the time to deliver an application up to a hundred times. This update may not magnetize marketers and media companies, but the gaming industry can benefit a lot from this.

Approxy, another industry neophyte thinks cloudpaging is promisng. Last week, the company adapted to this Numecent-patented technology. Appoxy plan to utilize this as use in a white-label, end-to-end platform for developers, publishers and aggregators.

Gaming innovations have just started and will progress until the humankind’s love for virtual games ceases.