Agawi, which provides a cloud-based platform for streaming games over the Internet, announced  it will be collaborating with Microsoft to bring games to Windows. Agawi, an acronym that stands for Any Game, Anywhere, Instantly, will use Microsoft’s Azure deliver Facebook social and mid-core games, web-based MMOs and PC core games. Agawi promises it will deliver top-tier “AAA” titles, but has not revealed which publishers or games that might involve.

Competition in the streaming video market is growing. Sony acquired a streaming gaming service, Gaikai, for $380 million earlier this year. There is demand, but success is guaranteed. Another streaming gaming provider, OnLive, recently declared bankruptcy.. Agawi plans not to make the same mistakes. Agawi plans not to make the same mistakes; CEO Peter Relan, OnLive’s initial problem was that they tried to run on a B2C service; he said,

“We are a B2B platform, we’re engaging with publishers. We don’t want to be a B2C service. We’re saying, ‘Look, here’s a technology, a platform that any publisher can use and bring their game to Windows 8.'”

Because the company is a B2B platform, their services and technologies are outlined for publishers so then they handle how to sell cloud based gaming to their customers. They call the business model CloudPlay, in which you still have to buy the game but once the game is purchased, you get access to the game from anywhere at any time. This protects the pricing of the game.

What sets Agawi apart as well is the fact that OnLive and even Gaikai took a datacenter approach and not a cloud approach. Now, this was not intentional. If any gaming company started four to five years ago, the cloud was very limited for gaming options. It was easy to get cloud computing on the CPU side but not the GPU side. Now, GPU clouds are a lot more common and you can stream games more efficiently without having to build a datacenter.