When OnLive announced that it would be officially shutting down its cloud gaming service on April 30, gamers who enjoyed the service had to confront the fact that they would have to seek an alternative. That’s when Larry Gadea, a frequent OnLive user, decided to take matters into his own hands.
On April 12, Gadea posted a blog update on his website that detailed how any gamer can operate his or her own gaming cloud service.
“Steam recently introduced In-Home Streaming, which basically creates a mini-OnLive in your own home with all the same Steam games I played with my eGPU,” wrote Gadea.
The gamer used Amazon Web Services to set up a Windows-based EC2 server with NVIDIA grid K520 graphics. After he installed Steam, he updated the graphics drivers from NVIDIA’s website. Then, he adjusted Windows’ settings to permit sound and prioritize the GRID graphics card.
Gadea also needed to make his Macbook Air appear on the same “local” network as his NVIDIA server. To achieve this, he set up a VPN service, and he was ready to go. Gadea proceeded to open Steam, download a game to his server and start playing it with Steam In-Home Streaming.
The total cost of operation breaks down to about $0.52 per hour. This includes costs for features such as data transferring and a GPU Spot. However, the effort appears to have been worth it for Gadea, who had heavily relied on OnLive for gaming in the past.
OnLive announced that it would officially be shutting down on its support site on April 1. Sony has acquired critical parts of OnLive, and the company has no plans to continue a gaming service.
“All accounts will be closed, and all data deleted including game save data, achievements, and credit card data will be deleted,” OnLive stated.
Gadea’s solution is unusual, but it may relieve some of the heartbreak that gamers felt upon hearing the big news.
