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Comment by Reubachi | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree with you. there's a cost benefit analysis we make when purchasing something and I can imagine the case where I'm ok paying 50c an hour for a remote game.

It's hard though not to see the writing on the wall in regards to "local compute GPU availability". Every single industry even tangentially related to compute power has "silently" moved their bus model to consumption based, despite the consumer base having 0 appetite for that. (We're not engineers/app developers who are forced to use LLM agents, we're trying to pay a service that hosts games.)

I am unsure how a medium that was a failure as a free/subscription model will succeed as a floating pay-as-you-go model.

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For a period of time I would rent a windows box with gpu from aws, install my game, and play it over parsec (a Remote Desktop tool designed for low latency). It was around $0.40/hour for a high-end gaming rig for the ~40 hours I needed to binge my new game. I play new games infrequently, so the cost analysis was “a new computer for $1500, or rent one for the time I need it for $15.”

It’s just a bummer that this process wasn’t a bit easier. I recall there was some setup involved.

from your perspective this feels like a positive, then, no? cheaper price per hour, no requirement that you use those hours all at once?

It's a positive in the sense that the industry has made it marginally cheaper in time/resources to pay-as-you-go.

It's a positive in the sense that due to these industry changes (computer power going up 20x in cost.), the platforms are offering a way to let us peons play games.

It's a negative in that it's a futher commitment of these vendors to hoarde compute/GPU power from western consumers and chinese LLM vendors. MS will routinely purchase the highest end GPU for sake of keeping this service alive, nevermind their own LLM. Good luck getting one yourself.

agreed

> ...a new computer for $1500...

How often do you buy new computers? I paid something like 2500 USD for my Threadripper machine (including 128 GB of RAM and graphics card) ~seven years ago. Between now and then I paid ~580 USD (at the end of last year) to get a new graphics card and that's it. After last year's upgrade, I've yet to run into a game that it doesn't play reasonably, and I've also gotten a lot of work done with it over all the years I've had it.

The console lifecycles being like a decade long has been a fantastic blessing for us PC gamers. Most AAA games are intended to run well on those ancient almost-PCs, which means that our old actually-PCs usually play the games just fine.

For me it’s about the infrequency at which I play new titles. I might play one game every 2-3 years? I bought a used Xbox series s for $200, and I’ve logged maybe 10 hours on it in the last two years? So… take my perspective with a grain of salt, I expect im an outlier.

yep, actually in my area this will be cheaper than the gaming cafes people frequent—I think the lack of reasonably-local servers is the main thing that will block adoption.

I'm not so certain the average gamer is well-informed enough to realize what they're giving up, or that they feel strongly enough to take a stand for it if they do. I'm hopeful they will, we'll see.

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