(disclosure: I work on the backend at Parsec)

For those who don't know either company: Unity is a popular 2D/3D commercial game engine, and Parsec is a low-latency remote desktop tool that initially focused on gaming, but pivoted to an enterprise product for remote creative teams during the pandemic.

I hope this doesn't mean the end of Parsec as a standalone service. There's nothing out there that comes close to Parsec's performance and it'd be a huge loss.

Congrats to the Parsec team, I'm a big fan of the service. Perhaps I'm out of touch, but it seems like $320M is a bit low, although I know it was still somewhat niche. Twitch turned out to be a huge bargain at $1B. These server-intensive video streaming services seem to require a lot of engineering and opex, although maybe Parsec was mostly on the client. It looks like they raised 2 rounds last year A at $7M in May and B at $25M in Dec- but I couldn't find a valuation. I guess that's nice cashflow for those investors, but I would think they would rather swing for the fences, no?

Slightly offtopic, but is there any open source/fair-code equivalent of Parsec that doesn't fail blatantly on non-standard aspect ratios such as 32:9 or have lots of other failure modes that they seemed entirely uninterested in fixing (marked as known issues for years, and no public source code available so I can't diagnose or fix them myself)?

I looked and there didn't seem to be much at all that didn't rely on just one vendor's as-buggy encoding stack - such as NVIDIA Experience software instead of just their drivers, and it's sad to see the closest tech to this this be part of some acquisition instead now by a company that seems uninterested in open sourcing anything even if it doesn't endanger any of their commercial market (e.g. Unity and their Burst LLVM compiler thing)... I don't even need all the matchmaking and team sharing stuff, I just want NVENC/etc.-based desktop streaming that doesn't bomb itself over the slightest system anomaly.

Interesting, I was expecting parsec to close shop after they stopped offering their paid hosting for gaming and refunded people's balance.

Looks like they just pivoted towards business users instead.

Anyway, congrats to the team!

Don't know why Unity is pursuing cloud, you're still going to need a good network speed. They'd be better served investing further in WebGL support, specifically in reducing the file binary size so we can have lightning fast load times for console-quality games running at near native performance in the browser.

Shameless plug, my startup is working on exactly this at the moment but for Unreal Engine 4, but we have plans to bring this tooling to Unity as well. The web has the opportunity to become the #1 distribution platform of choice for real time 3D developers, and it's the path to the decentralized metaverse.

I think tech like this is really fucking neat.

I've been playing around with similar ideas in the space. For instance, instead of delivering full frame buffers to your clients, send them instructions on what to draw based on their current viewport dimensions (e.g. webgl). This is more constrained and requires the application to target a specific UI framework - although I can support arbitrary 3d scenes of modest mesh and texture complexity now. The headline advantage here being the amount of data going across the wire is almost trivial in comparison for most use cases.

I think there is still a lot more to go in the area of server-side application delivery tech. Our networks are getting faster and our compute is getting denser.

The next generation of shardless MMO would depend on something like this. Getting to 1 million concurrent players will probably look a lot like a stock exchange.

Congrats to the Parsec team! I remember using it several years ago when it was still fairly early on and it was impressive then. I wasn't sure if it was a model that could really take off at the time but glad to see it has.

Really wish there were opensource alternatives to Parsec and Rainway that weren't tied down to hardware (Moonlight). As/if we move away from x86 I think it would be a great way to archive old games that haven't found their way to Webassembly.

It would definitely be great to see archive.org use something like it stream old software/games/media without having to distribute it.

In addition to using Parsec's tech for cloud-based gaming, I also foresee Unity using it to stream shared applications into multi-user mixed reality apps (for example, multiple users in AR or VR sharing a Windows desktop).

Is there any way you ever make $320m back by selling a better performance version of teamviewer/remote desktop? Or is there some other play here - e.g. a Stadia/GeForce Now competitor?

Catch up, RustDesk, https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk

Wow, shit. Parsec increased their prices after they stopped providing their gaming service.

Used to be that the client was free and you paid for the machine.

What's special about Parsec compared to competitors like Shadow.tech that seems just as good? (if not actually a bit better - i think personally after trying both)

Both are impressive but the tech must be somewhat standard no?

Also Shadow runs its own datacenters which seems far more impressive team wise.

Can anyone shed some light on why this technology is worth so much in that context?

I'm in a group for educators that use unity in the classroom and the most requested feature I've seen is having a way to utilize the tool from low power/cost devices like chromebooks. This seems right in line with that.

Congratulations to parsec team!. The remote desktop experience on Parsec is smooth and close to 60fps. I can even play games from my PC over 4G network. This is a killer solution for remote desktop.

Is their a huge market of games developers who don't have access to a machine capable of developing locally? Seems like a limited size market.

Good for the Parsec guys though!

What's the goal here? Cloud hosted version of Unity? Support for cloud-hosted gaming?

Anyone find a Parsec-like tool that supports Linux as a session host?

Ten years ago I thought that people would stop installing random indie games onto their computers and just play these small games in the browser. It never happened, people trust Steam, Gog, Epic and Itch.io more than they trust the web. Instead the web became increasing bloated and the ads and tracking became unbearable.

When Unity do streaming, it wont be through a browser, it will be a dedicated app that users trust. (like Netflix).

The value proposition of streaming is not that its on the web, it's that you don't need expensive hardware.

Unity is pursuing cloud because there is such a large opportunity. Even in the world you imagine where WebGL games take off multiplayer net code, matchmaking, server hosting, live ops, etc. could remain large markets.

Today, most large game companies do many of these things in-house — by offering services to solve some of these challenges Unity is hoping to lower the barrier to entry for smaller developers to compete and convince the larger ones that they would be better off using managed services instead.

WebGL is only good for shader toy, ecommerce and Flash like games from 10 years ago.

I wouldn't bet on a technology stack frozen in 2012 hardware capabilities, where I cannot be certain if the users can use my 3D renderings at all if they are misfortune enough to be on a mix of hardware, OS or GPGPU whose browser decided the best thing to do for user's safety was to switch to 3D software rendering.

The problem with the browser is that it is too bloated. Even if you manage to get performance with wasm you are still high up on a huge dependency tree that you'll never be able to climb down from.

As electricity prices go up we need to get closer to the metal, OpenGL might not be good but it's the best tool we have and probably will ever have. Vulkan might replace the middleware but the OpenGL API will survive.

As for the metaverse it does not depend on one implementation, but a bunch of file formats and network protocols, I'm pretty sure this protocol will prevail: http://github.com/tinspin/fuse

What’s your startup? I’ve been looking for something like this, the current state of web export from UE/Unity is very bad

How long do you think it will be before "good network speed" is available widely enough to be profitable?