I don’t think there is a ton of spare capacity. But even if there was the machines are designed for AI not gaming, e.g. low CPU clocks, the GPUs don’t have RT cores or video encoders, etc. Stadia had custom hardware, GeForce Now uses workstation GPUs, xCloud has custom servers. Gaming also isn’t a good use for spare capacity. Demand is very spiky and people don’t have a lot of time flexibility.

There's a pretty fair staging argument of AI for work, Gaming for play, that would keep north american data centers with north american customers running 2/3 of the day.

There's also an alternative which is that token prices are already high, downtimes do exist (semi frequent on Claude) or are managed by serving degraded versions/quants (speculation that has never really be proven afaik) or reducing thinking time ("juice" values from open AI), and that free tiers are not used much at all or are a loss leader.

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.

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.

They're selling it for AI. Unless retro-nostalgia explodes and gamers are overwhelmed by a desire to pay for tokens (more than ai users), that doesn't change anything.