5 ms·

To be fair, issues with lag aside, this is a pretty perfect use case for timesharing. Most people pay a lot of money for expensive components (games console or

To be fair, issues with lag aside, this is a pretty perfect use case for timesharing. Most people pay a lot of money for expensive components (games console or gaming PC) that they get limited utility from because they have other interests besides playing video games all the time - why not switch the model to be using those resources (that cost a lot of money) closer to 100% of the time if it saves money and hassle for everyone involved.

freeone3000 4y ago
Because it ends up not saving time, once the space is suitably fragmented, and not saving money, once the price is increased to what the market will bear.
- highwaylights 4y ago
  I don't know that timesaving was mentioned, but it still would save time in terms of jumping in and out of games on the browser. I don't see how fragmentation alters the cost-benefit of only paying for the timeshare of compute resources actually played. Cost saving would be assumed to actually increase due to fragmentation in the space. For example, if I want to play AAA games on my own hardware my options are (basically): 1). Gaming PC 2). Xbox Series 3). Playstation 5 With streaming the options I can think of (OTTOMH): 1). Google Stadia 2). Microsoft xCloud 3). PlayStation Now 4). Amazon Luna 5). GeForce Now 6). Smaller gaming-pc-in-the-cloud providers (e.g. Shadow) 7). Rent a remote machine and set up Steam/Origin/Epic 8). Whatever Apple gaming-in-the-cloud me-too comes along in the future I'm not sure it's a market that's struggling for competition.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
dron57 4y ago
I haven't run the numbers on game consoles or PCs, but in my day job of machine learning it absolutely makes sense to buy expensive hardware. Even accounting for the costs of electricity, full time system administration and hardware depreciation. AWS is making a killing on selling GPU time to startups that should put in the effort of getting their own on-prem compute. The market inefficiency here is that AWS knows that startups don't want to get distracted by system administration and they're squeezing it like hell.
- mrtranscendence 4y ago
  Not just startups, established companies as well. My employer (technically not itself large but a wholly owned subsidiary of a high-ranking Fortune 500 company) has been undergoing a long process of moving almost everything into the cloud and deprecating on-prem resources. The way they've done this was almost comically silly at first: letting every one of our scores of data scientists provision 32 or 64 node clusters all day, every day, without (initially) any thought or guidance given as to how to control costs. At some point they decided this was too expensive and switched cloud providers, even though the cloud provider wasn't the problem. Now I have people breathing down my neck every time I need a decent amount of compute for something ... it pains me to think of what kind of on-prem setup they could have stood up for the tens of millions (or more?) they've spent moving to "the cloud".
- highwaylights 4y ago
  Right... but this is a thread about a video game running on a video game service running in a web browser?

freeone3000 4y ago

Because it ends up not saving time, once the space is suitably fragmented, and not saving money, once the price is increased to what the market will bear.

highwaylights 4y ago
I don't know that timesaving was mentioned, but it still would save time in terms of jumping in and out of games on the browser. I don't see how fragmentation alters the cost-benefit of only paying for the timeshare of compute resources actually played. Cost saving would be assumed to actually increase due to fragmentation in the space. For example, if I want to play AAA games on my own hardware my options are (basically): 1). Gaming PC 2). Xbox Series 3). Playstation 5 With streaming the options I can think of (OTTOMH): 1). Google Stadia 2). Microsoft xCloud 3). PlayStation Now 4). Amazon Luna 5). GeForce Now 6). Smaller gaming-pc-in-the-cloud providers (e.g. Shadow) 7). Rent a remote machine and set up Steam/Origin/Epic 8). Whatever Apple gaming-in-the-cloud me-too comes along in the future I'm not sure it's a market that's struggling for competition.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

dron57 4y ago

I haven't run the numbers on game consoles or PCs, but in my day job of machine learning it absolutely makes sense to buy expensive hardware. Even accounting for the costs of electricity, full time system administration and hardware depreciation. AWS is making a killing on selling GPU time to startups that should put in the effort of getting their own on-prem compute. The market inefficiency here is that AWS knows that startups don't want to get distracted by system administration and they're squeezing it like hell.

mrtranscendence 4y ago
Not just startups, established companies as well. My employer (technically not itself large but a wholly owned subsidiary of a high-ranking Fortune 500 company) has been undergoing a long process of moving almost everything into the cloud and deprecating on-prem resources. The way they've done this was almost comically silly at first: letting every one of our scores of data scientists provision 32 or 64 node clusters all day, every day, without (initially) any thought or guidance given as to how to control costs. At some point they decided this was too expensive and switched cloud providers, even though the cloud provider wasn't the problem. Now I have people breathing down my neck every time I need a decent amount of compute for something ... it pains me to think of what kind of on-prem setup they could have stood up for the tens of millions (or more?) they've spent moving to "the cloud".
highwaylights 4y ago
Right... but this is a thread about a video game running on a video game service running in a web browser?