[pushedx]

Streaming is horrible. All of the game streaming services so far that offer a half-serviceable GPU cost $40+ per month, because that’s the minimum cost for offering a GPU to a user over the Internet. The remote end of a game stream is orders of magnitude more resource and power hungry than the remote end of a video stream. For it to be profitable, without tying in some kafka-esque monetization scheme into even single player games, it would have to cost at least $60 per month.

I’ve paid for and used multiple remote GPU gaming services and all of them suffered from horrible jitter in input lag. If even once every 20 minutes you suffer in a (even single player) game randomly due to network latency, you’re going to hate the service. This was on residential fiber as well. I think this is why Google exited the market. It’s just a bad gaming experience.

When you think about the type of player that would need to champion this service for it to reach critical mass among hardcore gamers, think of a speedrunner or top-level competitive MoBA or FPS player. In the offline case, they are honing thier skills at a time resolution of 16ms or less (in the case of an FPS player 8ms or less). This type of gameplay just isn’t possible over the Internet in general. Live more than 400 miles from a datacenter? Whoops, you can’t get good at games.

Game streaming, not to mention the “own nothing” aspect of it, is just horrible from the perspective of anyone who cares about the game they play and getting good at the game they play.

[MikusR]

Geforce Now is 20$ a month for a 4080.