alt Hacker NewsI think it’s death by a thousand cuts. I think internet connections are the least of the issue. Plenty of people have gaming PCs wired to 1Gb/s fiber. It may even be better because users can be close together.
Where I see bigger issues is: 1. Economics. GeForce Now for a 5080 is 20ct/h. At retail prices you may get close in electricity.
2. Others want to game when I want to game. What good is offering my PC up at 5am? Who would want to use the service if you can’t reliably get access when you want it. Not to speak of the issue of getting kicked out when the owner wants their PC back.
3. The whole: do you trust someone else’s computer/do you trust others on your computer. Users don’t want their login details stolen or get banned for using a cheaters PC and providers don’t want you to cheat or do other nasty stuff. You can’t really do VMs because consumer GPUs don’t really support virtualization so dual booting
4. You need to dedicate a ton of disk space. Because of 3 you can’t really share and now you have to deal with some system to have the relevant games available.
I agree with all those issues.
Just for discussion though: Economics don’t necessarily dominate these markets when providers aren’t informed - Uber drivers w/ depreciation for example. If your GPU is a sunk cost, and your electricity is cheap enough, it might be attractive (think consumers mining crypto back when).
A floating market rate or “surge pricing” could come into play. Outside of the top 10% of gamers by playtime, there’s plenty of idle compute during prime hours.
A secure environment would definitely be essential. SteamOS could be a great tool for that: dual boot SteamOS and make SteamBucks while you’re not using your computer.
You could only offer your machine for the titles you have downloaded. This again could be addressed by a market: popular titles could get more utilization, but obscure titles could command a premium.
No guarantee any of this would actually work, but it’d be an interesting model to explore if I were at Steam. They have hardware survey data, user activity, etc; to check viability.