alt Hacker NewsWhat 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.
Replies
freedomben • yesterday at 2:28 PM
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.
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.