👩🏿‍🤝‍👨🏾 👨🏿‍🤝‍👨🏽 🎭 Games for money: experience in a distributed gaming network of the owner of several servers 💏 👨‍🎨 🤳

Recently I saw an article on Habré "Distributed gaming network as an alternative to GFN" and decided to write about his experience of participation in such a network. It so happened that I am one of the first participants in the program described in the article. And I'm not a gamer, but just the owner of several productive PCs whose power is used by the network.

To immediately make it clear what I’m talking about, my servers are used by network-connected gamers of the cloud gaming service. The article mentioned above mentions SONM, Playkey, and Drova. I tried the service from Playkey and now I’ll try to talk about the nuances of the distributed network and work in it.

Network principle

Briefly describe how it all works. A cloud-based gaming service is looking for owners of powerful PCs who are ready to provide the computing resources of their machines for money. When a player connects to a cloud service, he automatically selects the server closest to the user, and the game runs on this particular machine. As a result, the delays are minimal, the gamer plays and rejoices, the cloud service and the server owner receive the money paid by the gamer.

How did I get into all this?

My experience in IT is about 25 years. For many years I have been managing a small private enterprise that specializes in developing navigation systems. I love games, but you can hardly call me a passionate gamer. The company has about two dozen powerful machines, the resources of which are far from being fully utilized.

Somehow I began to look for the opportunity to download them for the benefit of the company, that is, to get additional income. I saw several foreign and domestic services that offered to hand over the resources of their PCs for money. Most of the proposals are, of course, mining, which did not attract me from the word at all. Fake in this area at the time was 99%.

But I liked the idea of loading servers with games, the idea turned out to be close in spirit. First I applied for beta testing, it was accepted right away, but now the invitation to participate came in a year and a half.

What attracted me was that only hardware was required of me, and on the same physical server it was possible to run several virtual machines, which I did in the future. Everything else - installation of specialized software, configuration, updates - the service took over. And that was great, because I don't have much free time.

After deploying the system, I tested the game on a distributed network from the player’s side (I connected to my own server, which was several kilometers at the time of the game). Compared just with a game in the cloud. The difference was very noticeable - in the first case, the process could be compared to playing on your own PC.

Equipment and networks

I tested the work of a distributed network on different equipment. As for the PC, these were workstations based on Intel processors from i3 to i9, with different memory modules in volume and frequency. The computers have HDD and SSD drives with SATA and NVME interfaces. And, of course, Nvidia graphics cards of the GTX 10x0 and RTX 20x0 series.

To participate in the beta testing program, I used 4 servers based on i9-9900 processors with 32/64 GB RAM, each with 3 virtual machines. A total of 12 relatively powerful virtual machines that meet the criteria of the program. I placed this equipment on a shelf a meter wide. The housings were well-blown, with powerful cooling systems and dust filters.

Network equipment also used different things, bandwidth ranged from 100 Mbit / s to 10 Gbit / s.

As it turned out, most home routers with a bandwidth of up to 100 Mbps are not suitable for a distributed network. Actually, even normal network work with such devices is a problem. But gigabit routers with 2 or 4 core processors fit perfectly.

image-2020-04-16-15-09-09-58

This is what the server looks like on three virtual machines

Server load

I became a member of the distributed network program before the pandemic. Then the computers were loaded at about 25-40%. But after, when more and more people switched to isolation, the load began to grow. Now loading of some virtual machines reaches 80% per day. I had to postpone the test and maintenance work in the morning, so as not to create inconvenience to the players.

With the popularity of the service, the load on me and my colleagues has also increased - you need to monitor the work of virtual and physical machines. Sometimes there are failures that need to be fixed. However, so far we are managing, everything is going well.

I see the loading of my virtual machines in the admin panel. It shows which cars and how busy they are, the amount of time the player spent, which game started up, etc. There are a lot of details, so you can stick for a couple of hours, studying all this.

Maintenance

As he wrote, not without difficulties. The main problem is the lack of automated system monitoring and notification of server owners about problems. Hopefully these features will be added soon. In the meantime, I have to look into my personal account, monitoring equipment operation parameters, monitoring the temperature of server components, monitoring the network, etc. Experience in the IT field helps. Perhaps someone with an insufficient technical background may have problems.

True, most of the difficulties were solved at the very beginning of participation in the testing program. It would be nice to have a detailed setup manual, but I think this is a matter of time.

The most interesting - income and expenses

It is clear that this program is not SETi @ home, the main goal of PC owners is to make money. The best solution for this is a powerful computer with several virtual machines. The proportion of overhead in this case is much less than if you use one physical machine. Of course, in order to raise a virtual machine, and then run a game service on it, you need technical knowledge and experience. But there would be a desire - you can learn.

Energy consumption is much less than in the case of mining. I know what I'm talking about, because at one time I tried various options for the extraction of digital coins, although not for long. Here are the average energy consumption according to tests:

1 server (i5 + 1070) - one virtual machine ~ 80 kW * h / month.
1 server (i9 + 3 * 1070) - 3 virtual machines ~ 130 kW * h / month.
1 server (i9 + 2 * 1070ti + 1080ti) - 3 virtual machines ~ 180 kW * h / month.

At the very beginning of the beta testing program, payment for machine resources was purely symbolic, $ 4-10 per month per one virtual machine.

Then the payment was raised to $ 50 per month based on one virtual machine, subject to the continuous operation of the virtual machine. This is a fixed payment. The service soon promises to introduce per-minute billing, then, according to my calculations, it will turn out about $ 56 per month for one virtual machine. Not bad, even when you consider that part of the income is consumed by taxes, bank commissions, as well as electricity bills and provider services.

According to my calculations, the payback of equipment, if purchased exclusively for the gaming service, is about three years. At the same time, life expectancy (including physical depreciation and obsolescence) of computer hardware is four years. The conclusion is simple - it is best to participate in the program if you already have a PC. The positive thing is that now the demand for the service itself has grown. The company plans to introduce a new per-minute billing, as I mentioned above, so the payback period is likely to decrease in the near future.

Thoughts on and prospects for service

I think that the distributed gaming program is a great option for gamers with powerful PCs who can recoup their costs for their own equipment. They themselves do not need cloud games, but if there is an expensive car, why not return some of the costs or even pay for the equipment completely? In addition, the option of participating in a distributed gaming program is also suitable for companies like mine, where there are 100% of power that is not used. They can be converted into money, which is especially important in the current crisis conditions.

Distributed gaming is a kind of cloud smartbox that is available to a wide range of consumers. It provides an opportunity to receive rewards to owners of powerful machines, providing resources to third-party users. Well, gamers, in the end, do not experience problems with cloud games, since the servers are located at most a couple of tens of kilometers away from them, and not hundreds or even thousands, as is often the case with users of most cloud gaming services. And the larger the distributed network, the higher the quality of the game.

In the near future, cloud and distributed gaming will coexist, complementing each other. In the current environment, when the load on gaming services is growing, this is ideal. The popularity of games and gaming services will continue to increase in the future, after the pandemic ends, so that distributed gaming will gain momentum.

See also the continuation of the topic of cloud games in the article "Games for money: experience in deploying the PlaykeyPro service"

Games for money: experience in a distributed gaming network of the owner of several servers