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Comment by cprecioso | Hacker News Reader

I use Windows VMs on Google Cloud to install and play games in the cloud - my Mac can’t play any

Parsec is outstanding for this use case, it’s basically a roll-your-own Stadia. Dunno what its future will be now that it was acquired by Unity

Yep, usually use Parsec, or Moonlight + ZeroTier for this.

Nvidia GeForce Now offers this for free, 1 hour at a time.

It barely worked in their web client but the desktop client worked pretty well.

For me GeForce NOW is the best service, but it really sucks that I’m not allowed to play my whole Steam library. That’s a disqualified for me

hows the performance/input lag on that? How much are you paying & is it worth?

It really depends on how far away from the data center you are. I used to live close to Amsterdam and that felt basically local, even with a not-amazing internet connection. Right now I live in the Valencia (Spain), with a local and not very well paired ISP. There is lag, but it is just about acceptable for platformers and action/adventure games. I wouldn't recommend it for shooters.

The cost ended up being around 1€/hr when the instance was on, and 0.06€/day for the storage. I am sure this could be optimized (e.g. use snapshots and spot instance) - but I just couldn't be bothered to. For me it is worth it.

This is a very novel use case to me. Could you elaborate why use this solution instead of a local VM, boot camp, or something like Stadia?

Seems that it would work quite well for turn based games (including auto save)

I don't use a local VM or bootcamp because I just don't have a powerful enough computer to run AAA games from the last 5 years or so - even earlier if the game is badly optimized. Now with an M1 they're not even compatible.

Stadia, GeForce NOW, Xbox Game Streaming and PlayStation Now: I've tried them all, and GeForce NOW specifically is very good. But, they only allow me to play a subset of my large pre-existing game library, and/or make me buy games again, which I'm not interested in.

Stadia is specially bad at this, having to purchase on a game-by-game basis, not being compatible with any existing ecosystem (Steam, PS, Xbox have cloud saves and friend lists), and then trusting Google to run my game forever on their servers after paying a one-time cost.

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