Ask HN: Cloud-based gaming

[hsxd]

Hi! I recently discovered the growing market of cloud-based gaming, as someone with a ThinkPad who uses it for development and doesn't want to spend thousands on a computer that I'll only occasionally use to game, I'm very interested in the concept of cloud-based gaming. I recently discovered [Shadow](https://shadow.tech/int) and it sounds pretty great. Is there anyone here who has tried cloud-based gaming? There appears to be a few companies specializing in it. I'm a bit skeptical because of latency, but I can't find any bad reviews.

[gnode]

I've done it (Steam "in-home" streaming, over OpenVPN to AWS). It's works fairly well. Latency wasn't an issue for playing Skyrim, but for competitive multiplayer FPSes it's probably a no-go. You can tune the bandwidth vs. quality in Steam.

I followed this guide: https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow...

I found managing the VM on AWS to be a terrible pain. I may have misunderstood it, but it seems you can't just turn off a spot instance, have it persist and start it up again later. I had to snapshot the VM and make a new AMI after each run. You could possibly omit this if you don't want to persist the disk between runs.

Make sure not to accidentally leave your VM running or you'll wish you'd just bought a gaming rig; GPU instances are expensive, but it's fine for a few hours at a time.

As an alternative, I found: https://www.paperspace.com/gaming but I've not used it myself.

[ainiriand]

Latency is not an issue, assuming that sometimes you can send a packet around the world faster than a keypress is shown on the screen. Also assuming that you have 60hz refresh rate, that means that you need 60 images delivered per second. I think it is feasible. We will need to fact-check what I said with more competent users of HN but I think that the hypothesis is pretty solid.

[Zekio]

There exist an entire subreddit dedicated to this, with a ton of information about it https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudygamer/