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Comment by alex-wallish | Hacker News Reader

"Airbnb for Gamers" according to the infographic isn't taken. Any potential there? Letting people rent out their physical gaming rigs to other people in the area, in their homes. Seems like it'd be pretty easy to set up.

I could see it be kind of like gaming cafe's in Asia, except you'd be renting a rig in somebody's actual home. I don't know if there'd be any market for this, but it seems like it wouldn't take to much to whip up and to a trial run in a city.

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Nobody wants their hands to touch someone else's booger and cheeto dust coated peripherals, or vice-versa. There have been some times recently where I'd have paid money (but not much) to test drive computer hardware before buying it, but to some extent you can do that by purchasing from places with a liberal return policy.

Speaking of test drive, I'm in the market for a car and would love to be able to actually test drive some of the contenders without having pushy sales people all over me and in my voicemail for the next 2 months. Opportunity?

Google Voice number for car dealerships.

Turo to try cars out for a few days. The owner would probably be happy to tell you what they do or don't like as well - and perhaps sell it to you if they were looking for something else.

Turo if you could search by car type without having to specify date ranges maybe?

I suspect that, at least in places with decent internet, something like ShadowPC negates the need for such a service. I rent a top of the line gaming PC for ~$25/month, and run my games in the cloud.

With what I used to spend keeping a gaming rig upgraded, it doesn't even make sense not to rent something that's always going to be state of the art.

Can't really play FPS or RTS on the cloud, though

EDIT: I'll be damned, according to reddit you can even do CSGO on one of these beasts. I guess that solves what I'm buying myself for Christmas

I was on an early pilot for Google Stadia and could play Assasin’s Creed Oddyssey smoothly on a high speed internet connection.

Odyssey isn't even responsive on a local gaming pc, your character moves like it's behind 50ms of latency in any case

You'd be surprised. I even connect from an Oculus Quest and stream VR over wifi without noticeable lag.

First time hearing about Shadow. Their site doesn't mention anything about usage limits, so it sounds a bit too good to be true. Do they have any usage limits in practice?

Not that I've experienced or heard about. My household puts about a terrabyte of bandwidth through Shadow per month, and we haven't had any issues.

The cheapest I see is 25 dollars a month billed annually :(

Ah, I just checked, and I have some referral credit that gives me a discount. Sorry to misadvertise the price!

Maybe not an opportunity for consoles per se (see cheeto comment), but maybe an opportunity for renting games from your neighbors. Heck, I could see this being extended online in quite a unique way. Cheaper renting some movie or game from someone who already owns it...

Except that nobody owns games or movies anymore. I suspect that letting someone log on to my Steam account would potentially be grounds for a banning, and losing whatever investment I have in the platform.

I heard there's quite a market still: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA

Redbox is a thing. Not for renting out PC games, but there is a case for renting out physical console games. A large part of GameStop’s business model is retrading second hand games.

AFAIK those are dying. DLC's killing them. You buy (or rent) the disk, you only get like half the game. The rest can't be resold. Consequently, second-hand prices for disks seem to be dropping quite a bit, outside certain categories where that's less of an issue (Nintendo, kinda, and certain genres that still aren't that heavy on DLC like JRPGs). The dropping prices might but OK but with digital stores competing, and providing pretty good prices to anyone willing to wait for a sale, volume (both coming in, and being sold) is surely going down too, at least relative to total market size if not absolutely (and I suspect it's dropping absolutely, too).

Gamestop & friends seem to be muddling along through inertia, the larger-than-it-was but still-small retro gaming market (less Gamestop, they don't carry stuff that old), and selling non-game materials. And new games that come with DLC tickets and such. Not so much used sales or rentals (remember renting games from Blockbuster?)

It would have to be a disruptive model for sure...

Blockbuster use to rent consoles. But in general the market for that sort of service is capped by the relatively low cost of said consoles. Plus you have the problem of everything being tied to an account these days.

Maybe on the PC side you could have a guy loaning out his rig with his monster Steam library and VR setup. On a small scale this might be a modest success, but it's hard to see it ever becoming the next Uber/AirBNB.

There's an app called Rainway for doing streaming from a gaming PC you own to a laptop, phone, tablet.

So you could create a service allowing people to rent out their PCs remotely. Sort of Airbnb for Stadia.

There would probably be licensing issues, but I'm not sure how that currently works for gaming cafes.

Some local arcade/pinball operators will rent out their games, but there's no easy to use service for that. But I don't think high-cost/high-touch rentals like that lend themselves to cheap/scaleable apps.

Cloud gaming is coming, soon it'd be what's the point.

People on Fat Llama in the UK rent their gaming rigs

https://fatllama.com/

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