One of my Twitter pals shared this wicked cool Amazon EC2 hack that basically shows you how to rent Amazon cloud server time to run your own personal high end Steam PC streaming service. After quite a bit of technical Amazon server bit flipping you can run high end PC titles like The Witcher 3 for about 53 cents an hour. Factoring in the cost of running your own high end PC, renting the time from Amazon doesn't seem like a bad option.

The steps listed in the blog post are pretty technical but you can skip all the way to the end by just using the EC2 image and going from there. If you didn't know, Amazon rents time in its cloud for any person or company to use. You can rent Linux or in this case, Windows servers starting from some meager specs to something that can run Witcher 3. Interested in getting one setup yourself? Check the blog post below.

http://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html

Travis   Admin wrote on 08/18/2015 at 03:04am

That's WAY cheaper than Playstation Now.

jdodson   Admin   Post Author wrote on 08/18/2015 at 03:08am

True, but you have to bring your own games. I think part of the cost involved with PS Now and the like is the game is included? Or something?

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/psnow/faq/

Looks like you can rent most PS Now games for $1 a day? So this would be more expensive because it's 50 cents an hour. PS Now also seems to offer a Netflix style service for $20 a month? Thing is, that price doesn't include the hardware, something the Amazon services offers.

That said, I wouldn't go PS Now as the overall cost of the hardware + fee would be more than buying Steam games + Amazon rental fee with this option. Oh I guess that means you're right then smile

Travis   Admin wrote on 08/18/2015 at 03:52am

A few things:

First, I read "53 cents an hour" as "53 cents a day" at first, so there's that.

But to determine which is cheaper (or rather, a better value)l, there are a lot of factors to take into account. You buy the Witcher 3 for example and you can play it whenever you want when you have the beefy hardware. It isn't a game rental, really, like PS Now.

You don't need any additional hardware for PS Now, it all runs on Sony's servers, you don't pay for those. BUT, the cost of a new PS4 if you don't already have one is way higher than something that can stream Steam games.

But I think the prices have dropped on PS Now since the last time I checked, so I was definitely wrong about it being cheaper. Overall.

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