Posted July 18, 2017 Hello, I have an idea that I've been thinking of for a couple of weeks now and would like to ask for some input. I want to start a small cloud gaming business in the north of Europe. It would let you create an account and pay for hours, sort of like an internet café. The streaming solution I've looked at is moonlight, formerly limelight. It lets you use geforce gamestream a bit more freely. Maybe you could use an internet cafe software for logging in and launching games. It would also log out the customers when their time is out. Of course you would need to take some safety precautions to prevent people from doing illegal activities from your ip. Any ideas? Say I was going to start with 5 pc's. Would you build 5 separate computers and hook them all up to the web or would you do something like 7 gamers 1 CPU and rent out each VM? Sorry if this got a little messy or if it should have been in another sub-forum. I would greatly appreciate any feedback and tips. I have certenly not thought of everything, feel free to remind me of any potential problems I could run in to! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 18, 2017 You mean like gamefly? I think your biggest hurdle will be getting consistent high speed bandwidth. As for the other question, yes, you would do like 7 gamers, 1 cpu. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 18, 2017 This has been tried several times on a big scale and always failed. Safe your Money for something People would actual use. CPU i7 6700k MB MSI Z170A Pro Carbon GPU Zotac GTX980Ti amp!extreme RAM 16GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance 3k CASE Corsair 760T PSU Corsair RM750i MOUSE Logitech G9x KB Logitech G910 HS Sennheiser GSP 500 SC Asus Xonar 7.1 MONITOR Acer Predator xb270hu Storage 1x1TB + 2x500GB Samsung 7200U/m - 2x500GB SSD Samsung 850EVO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 18, 2017 Personally i would do this more like 7 gamers with VMs running on VMWare ESXI (theres a free version) You would then have the ability to reset the machine back to the way it was before the person started the session. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 18, 2017 25 minutes ago, lilDelta said: You mean like gamefly? I think your biggest hurdle will be getting consistent high speed bandwidth. Latency is the biggest enemy of this idea, because clouding. You do not want high latency when playing let's say an FPS, but that's exactly what you'll get. The ability to google properly is a skill of its own. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 18, 2017 You want to look at how internet cafes operate. Just go to one or go work at one for a week or two. I dont know the software stack in use, here in NZ the software in use appears to be in the korean language. The gaming cafes I have been to appear they PXE boot from lan. The 7 gamers 1 PC thing; do a cost/performance analysis and you will find total cost is higher. Thin client technology is not good for gaming. If I were to run an internet cafe I would start with a proper cafe, because they make good money. I would fill it with i3 or the new ryzen3 computers and I would use the low-end e-sports cards like the GTX1050. If I were to use ubuntu to run e-sports titles I would use a AMD GPU. Ryzen APUs will be coming out soon so they might be more cost effective. Also have you looked at licensing costs for Windows in internet cafes? The keyword is "rental rights". Its not cheap. from Microsft.com: Spoiler Microsoft introduced Rental Rights licenses because the Windows desktop operating system and Microsoft Office licenses do not permit renting, leasing, or outsourcing the software to a third party, regardless of whether or not a fee is collected for such use. As a result, many organizations that rent, lease, loan, or outsource PCs to third parties do not comply with Microsoft licensing. Certain finance leases and long-term leases of qualifying original equipment manufacturer (OEM) versions of the Windows desktop operating system and Microsoft Office do not require Rental Rights and are allowed under the Lease Agreement for Microsoft Products Installed on Leased Computers. Renting, leasing, and outsourcing PCs are becoming increasingly popular with business models, ranging from shortterm rentals through Internet cafés, free or paid use at hotel and airport kiosks, to complex multiyear contracts with vendors serving large organizations. Rental Rights licenses from Microsoft provide an easy way for organizations to rent, lease, loan, or outsource PCs to third parties with licensed, qualifying Windows operating system or Microsoft Office software. ☼ ψ ︿_____︿_ψ_ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 19, 2017 1 hour ago, HentaiHorse said: Hello, I have an idea that I've been thinking of for a couple of weeks now and would like to ask for some input. I want to start a small cloud gaming business in the north of Europe. It would let you create an account and pay for hours, sort of like an internet café. The streaming solution I've looked at is moonlight, formerly limelight. It lets you use geforce gamestream a bit more freely. Maybe you could use an internet cafe software for logging in and launching games. It would also log out the customers when their time is out. Of course you would need to take some safety precautions to prevent people from doing illegal activities from your ip. Any ideas? Say I was going to start with 5 pc's. Would you build 5 separate computers and hook them all up to the web or would you do something like 7 gamers 1 CPU and rent out each VM? Sorry if this got a little messy or if it should have been in another sub-forum. I would greatly appreciate any feedback and tips. I have certenly not thought of everything, feel free to remind me of any potential problems I could run in to! 7 Here is the thing first latency will make the experience pretty bad cause latency and internet speeds second you need to build some type of server that creates vms or something kind of like 7 gamers 1 cpu except this would probably have to be more than that cause demand would be fairly large if you advertise and during peak times you would need a lot of resources. If you are really interested in doing this you need 2 things: 1. Startup Capitol either get a small business loan investors or both. This strikes me as the type of thing crazy investors will love. You will need the money because THIS WILL BE VERY EXPENSIVE. 7 gamers 1 cpu cost tens of thousands of dollars and you will need more resources and more processing power etc. You also will need a very good business internet connection to handle the amount of bandwidth you would be using not to mention all the gear you would need like a router and networking crap. Then you have the issue that this will be pretty complicated to create. This won't be a simple plug and play thing. Honestly you need to hire someone or a staff to build this stuff. Which leads me to two. 2.HIRE SOME HELP This will not be simple. This will be very complex and will involve hard work to build and maintain this service. This is not something you could probably do. You will probably need to set up a website. You need a full stack developer who can also be a sys admin or 2 people: a sys admin and a full stack developer. Either way, you will need some help to do this don't try to do it by yourself you will probably fail. Linus would probably fail if he tried to do it by himself. Look I get it all the above seems daunting because it is and odds are this won't work but if you are passionate about this idea get some startup capital and do it right. I sincerely wish you good luck ps pls post updates on how all this goes on this thread thx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 19, 2017 Author Wow, thank you so much for all the replies! Just to adress some of the things being brought up: I have a 500/500 internet connection at home that I was planning to test on, just to get an idea of the latency you would get when streaming within the country. Since I was planning to stick to the nordic counries, perhaps latency would be lower. As Schischka brought up, many internet cafés seem to boot from a disk on the network and remove all changes made. I belive that would be useful in this case too. I've thought of this as something I could start really small scale without any outside investments. That way I wont lose too much if there is just no demand. Of course there are problems with this too, no free PCs during peak hours, as TheComputerdude said, for example. Surely there are many challenges to overcome, and I am not expecting to solve them all myself. I do have a lot of free time and dedication, though All feedback is greatly appreciated so please keep pointing out problems, solutions or just anything you have to say regarding this! And yes, I will keep you updated! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 19, 2017 That's pretty much what Leap Computing is all about but they've been in pre-order/test for years now. You might want to look into this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 19, 2017 Hi, so I just want to give you some inputs from my perspective. Who buys the game / has a license for the game (also from a legal perspective)? Who is your customer and how do you aquire them (acquisition costs a lot of time and money... often completely forgotten...)? What do you do with those HW Resources in the meantime, when there are no players? Latency... How reliable is your connection. Is 500Mbps symmetric enough? How reliable are your systems? Reliability has its price Do you have professional networking gear? How much are you willing to invest, this won't be cheap and cost a lot of time... Is there a demand big enough to make it worth it? I mean a PS4 is around 300$ and you own a reliable system you can use anytime... You will have high fixed costs, so starting with a few customers might nit be the best idea... and like I said above would be a shame if your hardware is only used for some hours a day. I think, only Gamestreaming is just not worth it / there is just not enough demand form my perspective, so I would think a bit more out of the box... How can you utilize your hardware profitably when nobody is gaming. Most probably you will have peak demand times, but most of the time not that much load... Business Management Student @ University St. Gallen (Switzerland) HomeServer: i7 4930k - GTX 1070ti - ASUS Rampage IV Gene - 32Gb Ram Laptop: MacBook Pro Retina 15" 2018 Operating Systems (Virtualised using VMware): Windows Pro 10, Cent OS 7 Occupation: Software Engineer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 19, 2017 Author 4 hours ago, leodaniel said: Hi, so I just want to give you some inputs from my perspective. Who buys the game / has a license for the game (also from a legal perspective)? Who is your customer and how do you aquire them (acquisition costs a lot of time and money... often completely forgotten...)? What do you do with those HW Resources in the meantime, when there are no players? Latency... How reliable is your connection. Is 500Mbps symmetric enough? How reliable are your systems? Reliability has its price Do you have professional networking gear? How much are you willing to invest, this won't be cheap and cost a lot of time... Is there a demand big enough to make it worth it? I mean a PS4 is around 300$ and you own a reliable system you can use anytime... You will have high fixed costs, so starting with a few customers might nit be the best idea... and like I said above would be a shame if your hardware is only used for some hours a day. I think, only Gamestreaming is just not worth it / there is just not enough demand form my perspective, so I would think a bit more out of the box... How can you utilize your hardware profitably when nobody is gaming. Most probably you will have peak demand times, but most of the time not that much load... Hi, thanks for your input! I was thinking the customer would log in to their own account, steam, lol, wow, etc. I've looked around and came to the conclusion that renting out a steam account with a full library of games with the PC would not be allowed. My customer I have in mind is someone with a decent computer that is not good enough to play the top titles on max settings. Or maybe someone out and about with only a laptop available. As far as customer acquisition goes, internet advertising is what I've planned on using. Also, PC papers here seem to write alot on all the cloud gaming services that are not even available in Sweden. I think they would be interested in covering this as well. My internet connection, as I said, is 500/500 with the option to upgrade to 1000/1000. The latency is very low but I am not home at the moment so I cannot measure it, unfortunately. It has also never been down one single time in the last 5 years. Atleast not when I've been on. Sure, you can buy cheap consoles today, but I don't think they provide nearly as good of an experience compared to a PC on max settings in something like Witcher 3. And even if you have a PC or console that you are satisfied with, you cant bring it with you everywhere. I really think a cloud gaming solution that works well has a place. As for the PCs that are not being used, I dont know. The most obvious thing that comes to mind is cryptomining. My electricity is cheap, but even if it is profitable now, will it be in a year? Please fill in if you have any ideas! Again, thanks for your replies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 19, 2017 Dude, believe me. The Target Group you are looking for, doesnt exist. CPU i7 6700k MB MSI Z170A Pro Carbon GPU Zotac GTX980Ti amp!extreme RAM 16GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance 3k CASE Corsair 760T PSU Corsair RM750i MOUSE Logitech G9x KB Logitech G910 HS Sennheiser GSP 500 SC Asus Xonar 7.1 MONITOR Acer Predator xb270hu Storage 1x1TB + 2x500GB Samsung 7200U/m - 2x500GB SSD Samsung 850EVO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 20, 2017 Why would I do this when I can buy games on g2a and own them forever? Or even in steam sales Smoking weed at the red light like its legal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 20, 2017 Author 6 hours ago, HunterSkater429 said: Why would I do this when I can buy games on g2a and own them forever? Or even in steam sales It is not about buying the games. You simply rent the hardware to play them on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 20, 2017 7 hours ago, HentaiHorse said: It is not about buying the games. You simply rent the hardware to play them on. I thought you said a cloud gaming. Not a come to my place rent a PC to bring home. Smoking weed at the red light like its legal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 20, 2017 12 minutes ago, HunterSkater429 said: I thought you said a cloud gaming. Not a come to my place rent a PC to bring home. It is his plan is to basically offload all the processing to the server and use your own steam library I have no clue how though Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 20, 2017 30 minutes ago, TheComputerdude said: It is his plan is to basically offload all the processing to the server and use your own steam library I have no clue how though So just game streaming? Like many other services had tried and pretty much failed.becase people rather buy the game and play with no noticable input lag. Rather than stream it and get a few seconds of lag. Smoking weed at the red light like its legal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 20, 2017 Author 2 hours ago, HunterSkater429 said: So just game streaming? Like many other services had tried and pretty much failed.becase people rather buy the game and play with no noticable input lag. Rather than stream it and get a few seconds of lag. You still need to buy the game but if your computer can't run it on the settings you want, game streaming could be an option. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 20, 2017 23 minutes ago, HentaiHorse said: You still need to buy the game but if your computer can't run it on the settings you want, game streaming could be an option. Yes that's what the other serves do room it's running off their machine and streamed to you so it's their performance. But the lag makes it worse then lower settings in some games. And you'll need to own the game they can't stream it to you and you stream it back. Smoking weed at the red light like its legal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 20, 2017 Author 17 minutes ago, HunterSkater429 said: Yes that's what the other serves do room it's running off their machine and streamed to you so it's their performance. But the lag makes it worse then lower settings in some games. And you'll need to own the game they can't stream it to you and you stream it back. But if, for example, steam is logged out every time someone logs on to a PC, that person can log on to their own steam accout and play all the games they own. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted July 20, 2017 5 minutes ago, HentaiHorse said: But if, for example, steam is logged out every time someone logs on to a PC, that person can log on to their own steam accout and play all the games they own. I don't think steam likes the same ip logging into into multipul steam accounts thoughout the day Smoking weed at the red light like its legal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now