Hi! I recently discovered the growing market of cloud-based gaming, as someone with a ThinkPad who uses it for development and doesn't want to spend thousands on a computer that I'll only occasionally use to game, I'm very interested in the concept of cloud-based gaming. I recently discovered [Shadow](https://shadow.tech/int) and it sounds pretty great. Is there anyone here who has tried cloud-based gaming? There appears to be a few companies specializing in it. I'm a bit skeptical because of latency, but I can't find any bad reviews.
I've done it (Steam "in-home" streaming, over OpenVPN to AWS). It's works fairly well. Latency wasn't an issue for playing Skyrim, but for competitive multiplayer FPSes it's probably a no-go. You can tune the bandwidth vs. quality in Steam.<p>I followed this guide: <a href="https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html" rel="nofollow">https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow...</a><p>I found managing the VM on AWS to be a terrible pain. I may have misunderstood it, but it seems you can't just turn off a spot instance, have it persist and start it up again later. I had to snapshot the VM and make a new AMI after each run. You could possibly omit this if you don't want to persist the disk between runs.<p>Make sure not to accidentally leave your VM running or you'll wish you'd just bought a gaming rig; GPU instances are expensive, but it's fine for a few hours at a time.<p>As an alternative, I found: <a href="https://www.paperspace.com/gaming" rel="nofollow">https://www.paperspace.com/gaming</a> but I've not used it myself.
Latency is not an issue, assuming that sometimes you can send a packet around the world faster than a keypress is shown on the screen. Also assuming that you have 60hz refresh rate, that means that you need 60 images delivered per second. I think it is feasible.
We will need to fact-check what I said with more competent users of HN but I think that the hypothesis is pretty solid.
There exist an entire subreddit dedicated to this, with a ton of information about it <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudygamer/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudygamer/</a>