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Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Am I ridiculous for wanting this to be a sort of on demand service with a small markup?

I would definitely be interested in such a service. I've basically stopped gaming these past 3 years and now my old rig is severely out of date. It is too much money and hassle to buy and build a new rig that I wouldn't be using that much anyway (and will be out of date in a few years!)

If anybody out there seriously starts working on such a service, let me know!

This solves so many problems for me. I love the idea of streaming games. I have driven the cost of computing at home sharply over the past few years by using a Chromebook ($130!) and Chromecast along with my phone. The last part of this is scratching that itch for PC gaming.

My rig is about 7/8 years old and I've only upgraded the video card when I had to. I'm looking at building a new rig just to keep up and a "cheap" one comes out to $800 for me. Something like this would be very desirable. I would love to be able to shoot this to my main big TV and only using my Chromebook to access it.

Not ridiculous at all. Seems like a nice logical step from the failed business attempt of ...forgot the name but the company that provided streaming service but had lock-in of games on their platform.

Was it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive?

OnLive and https://www.gaikai.com/ (acquired by sony)

OnLive and Gaikai were the big two that I remember. Gaikai was acquired by Sony, and OnLive failed and parts of it were also sold off to Sony.

I wonder how much of this post is covered by patents now owned by Sony.

You're basically combining three parts, Steam Streaming, nVidia's hardware stuff, and OpenVPN. OpenVPN and all the high-level ideas it embodies definitely predates Gankai or anything like that. Steam Streaming and nVidia's stuff are certainly going to be covered by their own patents. In theory the combination could be patented but I'd argue for "a network stream can be run over a VPN" is firmly "obvious to those skilled in the art"... network streams are network streams are network streams.

Sony et al probably have more specific patents for their own setups, but to the extent they cover this setup they'd either be obvious, or they'd be trying to sue you for doing stuff covered under nVidia or Valve's patents. This, alas, doesn't necessarily protect you, but would certainly raise some PR issues. Plus Amazon might have some questions as well, since they don't want people getting hit for using cloud services to do things; anything that smells like special cloud licensing just because you're doing X "but in the cloud!" is going to hurt their business model.

I can't guarantee they have nothing to sue over, but the costs/benefits would not seem to argue in favor of Sony suing.

OnLive? [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

I'm actually really tempted to do just that - I reckon there are at least a few people who'd pay decent money to avoid building a new gaming machine.

The question is, what will you do different to succeed where they failed? Because otherwise, you're just gonna fail like they did.

I guess you're not going to own all the infrastructure and simply have it as a cost of business which you can pass on to the customer.

On top of that hardware costs vs performance along with hardware h264 encoding is getting cheaper.

Do you realize Onlive failed on performance merits alone .. while incorporating tricks like video compression/decompression 'racing the beam' (to avoid waiting for whole frame). Even with all the highly custom magic most games felt LAGGY. Here with this EC2 implementation we see 30-50ms on top of network latency to get you a picture on the screen to begin with.

Almost no one will pay for laggy games at last gen resolution.

some people are clearly willing to use it, especially for games that are a bit more casual and story driven. and like I said there's no huge risk where you're sitting on all this top-end hardware to play the games with this setup.

I wonder if part of OnLive's problem is that their primary competition (people buying XBox etc and playing from home) was highly giftable, both the initial hardware purchase and the individual games.

I assume in their case they were investing in the infrastructure as well, which would be a significant cost; if one just resold this service on top of Amazon for cost +x% they wouldn't have that kind of capital exposure, not to mention no marketing / advertising if it's kept as a small side project.

The thing that I would worry more about when running a service like this would be liability for what users of your service do / say.

So far it only makes financial sense if you use spot instances, and they can disappear instantly.

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