Show HN: I built a FOSS tool to run your Steam games in the Cloud

Show HN: I built a FOSS tool to run your Steam games in the Cloud(github.com)

30 points by pierrebeucher 1 year ago | 9 comments

I wanted to play my Steam games but my aging PC couldn’t keep up, so I built Cloudy Pad - a tool to run Steam in the Cloud (GitHub: https://github.com/PierreBeucher/cloudypad)

It runs on AWS, Azure, GCP, Scaleway and Paperspace with various cost optimizations and safeties:

- Cost alerts

- Auto stop inactive instances to avoid unwanted cost

- Disk snapshots and data cleanup for cost efficiency

- Spot instance support

Under the hood: a Linux VM and a container running Sunshine (a streaming server https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine) with Steam. Most Windows games work just fine thanks to Proton.

It streams effortlessly at 1080p 100+ FPS - I recently played Baldur’s Gate III and Clair Obscur in Ultra, ran like a breeze.

Cost-wise it’s great for occasional players: ~30h or less per month typically cost less than 25$. Though admittedly for heavy gamers it may be less cost-effective due to cloud pricing.

I’d love feedback from the HN community !

badoodle 1 year ago |

Cool cool, but hasn't this been achived by multiple projects many many times before?

I'd say that cost is a significant factor for doing this, and if you can leverage the usage of those fancy kubernetes GPU-cluster providers it'd come out even cheaper. Sure, it wouldn't be as "sophisticated", but it'd perform more or less identical and cost far far less.

All the above used cloud-providers are expensive, if compared to something like vast.ai or runpod.

Check this out; https://github.com/selkies-project/selkies

pierrebeucher 1 year ago | |

You're right cost is an issue, that's why Cloudy Pad is mostly suitable for occasional players (up to 30h or 40h / months) in which case it's still cost efficient to use such Cloud providers.

> more or less identical and cost far far less.

I wish it would, for I have tried: the problem is GPU availability which is often low or highly elastic. Considering data are persisted in a given region, there's high chance your RTX 4090 will be unavailable when you want it.

These platforms are great for AI and inference since you can easily hop onto another GPU type and it's not too much an issue if a certain GPU type is not available at a given time. Not so much for gaming purpose :(

Major Cloud providers have much more availability on their infra.

> Check this out; https://github.com/selkies-project/selkies

Thanks, this is one of the project I had in mind beside Wolf and Sunshine but haven't gone as far. A good reminder to try it out again :)

colingauvin 1 year ago |

For those of us with our own home servers - is this easily deployable without cloud?

DistractionRect 1 year ago | |

Yes, they build off other open source projects and list them in the README. I actually do run moonlight + sunshine myself, and have for more than a year. It's not too difficult to setup, depends on what you want to achieve.

I hadn't heard of wolf [0], but it checks a lot of boxes that sunshine does not. Namely, it supports multiple clients at once, multiple streams, and virtual displays out of the box (Linux + container first is almost neat). Sunshine is more for allowing your gaming desktop to be used as for game streaming. There's also a fork of sunshine, Apollo [1], that's more similar to wolf.

[0] https://github.com/games-on-whales/wolf [1] https://github.com/ClassicOldSong/Apollo

pierrebeucher 1 year ago | | |

Do you also use a VPN like Tailscale for out-of-home / remote access ?

pierrebeucher 1 year ago | |

Hi there, I'm Pierre the creator. Work is in progress on this, I hope it will be available in a few weeks since it's a highly requested feature :)

ericrenan 1 year ago |

nice work

pierrebeucher 1 year ago | |

Thanks ! Do not hesitate to let me know how it goes if you give it a try