[somat]

The steam link actual.

While the hardware is no longer being sold the software sort of lives on. In an android app among other things.

Tangentially it almost feels like steam could make a stadia like thing work. They have most of the moving parts including crucially, the bit google didn't, an established base of customers. Tomorrow steam could introduce a "play your games anywhere on any hardware" feature and no one would be surprised.

[nicce]

> While the hardware is no longer being sold the software sort of lives on. In an android app among other things.

It is built-in on every Steam. You can basically press two buttons and stream from your desktop to laptop if both have Steam with same accounts logged in.

> Tangentially it almost feels like steam could make a stadia like thing work. They have most of the moving parts including crucially, the bit google didn't, an established base of customers. Tomorrow steam could introduce a "play your games anywhere on any hardware" feature and no one would be surprised.

Already possible. While not so optimized as Games-on-whales.

[greggsy]

The thing I found limiting when I tried to run Steam remotely from my lounge room was the need to actually interact with the host PC at certain points, not just during the initial setup. I found this is the same on a lot of similar platforms, and it’s made worse when RDP clobbers the graphics settings.

A truly headless solution with a web ui would get me really interested.

[nicce]

Valve has truly headless runner (gamescope) for Linux, e.g. you can start it manually from command-line over ssh

  gamescope \
    --backend headless \
    -W 1920 -H 1080 \
    -w 3840 -h 2160 \
    -r 60 \
    --cursor-scale-height 1080 \
    --force-grab-cursor \
    -- steam -gamepadui -pipewire-dmabuf

You still need the initial setup for pairing.

But it has many issues compared to Games on Whales, for example, which is much more efficient and scales cursor better.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

[jvanderbot]

Furthermore, it will log in and unlock your host pc. If you're across town at a coffee shop and your 4 year old kids are near the host pc and see it unlock and start playing a game, you better believe they're gonna wreck your save file.

Not to mention greater security concerns.

[JeremyNT]

Yep, it's really only an option for a dedicated gaming PC (or a VM with the the GPU passed into it).

[ach9l]

That's not the same thing at all. Stadia was never about streaming from your own dedicated pc, it was about cloud computing. Something Valve does not have. In order for Steam Link to become Stadia, Valve requires the same data center capacity to serve games.

[dpoloncsak]

Steam Link has saved my ass more times than I can count.

VPN having issues, can't connect to any of my stack? Atleast I have a desktop on my LAN I can remote into...from my phone...

Basically anytime I have network issues while I'm away, reliable Steam Link connects me back to my infra ~97% of the time.

[jrm4]

Wait. Go on? Is this with or without the device?

For the record, I always wondered why I couldn't do something like this with whatever magic is happening under the hood with Syncthing.

I've been doing networking related things for over 20 years, and it's still wild what doesn't click for me...

[dpoloncsak]

Steam Link creates an RDP session (I assume their own protocol but for lack of a better term for it) that lets me control my Desktop from my phone.

Once I'm remote on the desktop, I can access my home-lab locally instead of via VPN. Before I moved to Tailscale, my self-hosted Wireguard setup was pretty shaky, and was running on an old Pi that had seen better days.

It's basically just using Steam to jump-box to my LAN, and from there you can do whatever you desktop can do on the LAN. (Steam Link has some oddities around UAC prompts, usually requiring input from the host and refusing from the client.)

You could probably use anything....Parsec, Moonlight, RDP, etc. But Steam is always running on my Desktop, and the phone-app helps a lot. I've used Parsec as well, but sometimes if using a commercial VPN Parsec is unable to connect. Steam tends to still create a session in these scenarios, but YMMV...I'm sure there's some config issues in my setup

[jrm4]

Aha, I'm getting back into this sort of thing, and I've always been a fan of Tinc for things like this, but it is showing its age.

[monk_grilla]

Do you leave your gaming rig switched on at home at all times?

[ekianjo]

Wouldnt they need racks of GPUs to do that at scale?

[als0]

Have you heard about the cloud?

[pxndxx]

The cloud is just someone else's computer. Do you think there's spare GPU compute available during the AI craze?

[alex43578]

What if steam users could offer their computers up for credit on steam? Not sure if most consumer internet connections would be up for it, but that would be an interesting model.

[YmiYugy]

I 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.

[alex43578]

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.

[freedomben]

I suspect the latency would absolutely kill, plus what happens to your killer in-game progress when the owner of the computer decides to play their own game or shut down the machine? So you'd need some sort of handoff, which seems technical very, very difficult.

[jdiff]

I think there's a lot of spare GPU compute. I don't think it'd be made available for this, or if it was, I believe it'd most likely be from a company that won't survive the AI bust. But I think there's a lot of spare compute sitting idle out there.

If there weren't, I think token prices would be higher than they are, downtime would be higher than it is, and there would be far fewer free tiers or more restrictions on free tiers.

[Zababa]

There's also an alternative which is that token prices are already high, downtimes do exist (semi frequent on Claude) or are managed by serving degraded versions/quants (speculation that has never really be proven afaik) or reducing thinking time ("juice" values from open AI), and that free tiers are not used much at all or are a loss leader.

[YmiYugy]

I don’t think there is a ton of spare capacity. But even if there was the machines are designed for AI not gaming, e.g. low CPU clocks, the GPUs don’t have RT cores or video encoders, etc. Stadia had custom hardware, GeForce Now uses workstation GPUs, xCloud has custom servers. Gaming also isn’t a good use for spare capacity. Demand is very spiky and people don’t have a lot of time flexibility.

[jvanderbot]

There's a pretty fair staging argument of AI for work, Gaming for play, that would keep north american data centers with north american customers running 2/3 of the day.

[Hamuko]

Seems like there is considering that Meta is currently selling their excess AI capacity.

https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-sell-excess-ai-computi...

[fineIllregister]

They're selling it for AI. Unless retro-nostalgia explodes and gamers are overwhelmed by a desire to pay for tokens (more than ai users), that doesn't change anything.

[tencentshill]

They also have datacenters in most major cities, so latency would be minimal. They're one of the only services that allows me to actually saturate my home internet bandwidth. But hosting game data and actually running the games is a lot different.