Why We’re Building $3000 Cloud Gaming PCs For Fortnite
A product developers out of control Fortnite obsession
I got a call late last year from my cousin, Chris. His thirteen year old son, Mac, was playing too much Fortnite, and he asked if I had any creative advice to get Mac to stop. I wasn’t familiar with Fortnite at the time, so I told him that I’d play a bit and let him know if I could think of any clever ways to stop him.
Two weeks went by, and not only had I failed to come up with any ideas, I’d downloaded the game on my phone and started playing Fortnite a lot myself. I was still a noob, fumbling through building and barely getting any kills, but I was hooked.
When Chris finally called back, I apologized for not coming up with anything, told him I’d actually developed my own Fortnite obsession, and then shamelessly asked if I could get Mac’s screen name so we could squad up. He laughed, and then told me that Mac was no longer playing Fortnite because he’d thrown Mac’s Xbox into the bottom of their swimming pool…
My dangerous descent into Fortnite obsession
What marked the sad, wet end to Mac’s Fortnite journey, also marked the beginning of my own. From that day on, I played Fortnite nightly with one of my best friends, Tom aka “Real Bush Master”. Tom, like me, played on his phone and also sucked at the game. Tom’s screen name was derived from his relatively despised style of play, where he would sit in a bush until it was only him and one other person left in the storm circle. At the last second, he would bust out of the bush and try to get the final kill. Surprisingly, his strategy worked a lot of the time, and Tom got a ton of Victory Royale’s.
After a few months of playing with Tom, I became so obsessed with Fortnite that I convinced my wife to let me spend an entire weekend competing in a Fortnite World Cup qualifying tournament. To qualify for the next stage, you play as many matches as you can in a few hours, multiple times a day, and get points for eliminations, placement, and victories. Like the true noob that I am, I played on my phone, and quickly realized that I was seriously outmatched by PC players.
PC players build incredibly fast with their keyboard and mouse, while mobile players build slowly because they can only use their two thumbs. Not to mention, PC players experience far superior frame rates, less lag, and way better graphics. I’d never played against PC players, but I felt like I was moving in slow motion.
Realizing my disadvantage in the tournament, I employed the “Bushmaster” strategy, and managed to rack up 18 points through placements and a Victory Royale. For reference, Ninja scored 26 points in the same tournament. I didn’t qualify, and I’m nowhere near as good as Ninja, but I was pleased with the sneaky performance of my two thumbs.
After that tournament, things got out of hand. I knew I needed to start playing on a PC if I was going to get any better, but I couldn’t believe the kind of sophisticated and expensive equipment gamers were purchasing for themselves. I noticed that the best gaming PC, with the best Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU, could cost upwards of $3000.
Falling into the cloud gaming vortex
In my real (non-Fortnite) life, I build software products for a living, and I often rely on cloud services to do so. Instead of buying and configuring a bunch of servers locally, cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure make it easy to access computing resources remotely. With just an internet connection, basically anyone can build an app like Uber or Airbnb and distribute it globally because of cloud services.
As I was considering buying my own gaming PC, I started to wonder, “why aren’t gamers using cloud resources instead of buying their own PCs?” I thought it might be a lot cheaper, since they could basically share the same resources. The answer, I found, is not so simple. If streaming Netflix is like algebra, streaming a video game from a remote PC is like multi-variable calculus.
Here’s why. In a cloud gaming setup, there’s a client PC and a host PC (aka server). The host PC needs at least a good graphics card and CPU, and the client PC doesn’t need any expensive hardware. In fact, the client PC can be as cheap and simple as a raspberry pi, so long as it has a decent internet connection, and proximity to the host.
When a client connects to the host, the host does all the work. If the download/upload speeds are high enough for the host, it can quickly receive the inputs being sent from the client and send back the appropriate responses. For instance, the host will be like “oh cool, the client moved the mouse, I guess I’ll do some awesome graphics rendering and send a high res feed of a player looking around their virtual world back to the client”. From the client’s perspective, if their download/upload speeds are good enough, they’ll constantly get this awesome stream from the host, and just send back their commands: e.g. move the mouse, hit this button on the keyboard, etc. This dance between client and host happens over and over, every millisecond.
If the host has really good internet (100mbps download /50mbps upload) and the client has okay internet (60mbps download /20mbps upload), the experience for the client should be close to as if they had their own high performance gaming PC in their living room (or rather, mom’s basement).
It’s this constant dance between client and host that makes cloud gaming one step more complicated than streaming a video on Netflix. With Netflix, it’s mostly just a unidirectional feed: Netflix (host) uploads content for clients to stream. The Netflix host has to worry very little about inputs coming from the client.
If the hardware, internet, and distance requirements are all met, video game streaming can work very well. Where things break down is when physics get involved, and distance ruins everything. A host could have excellent hardware with excellent internet speeds, and a client could have excellent internet speeds, but if they’re too far away from one another, soul crushing latency will be a problem.
If I’m sending a mouse click from a PC in California to a high powered gaming PC host in Beijing, and the host takes that input to render some graphics and send the feed back to California, I’m going to notice a delay between my input and what I’m seeing on the screen. In Fortnite terms, I’m going to get pickaxed to death as soon as I drop in.
My obsession peaks, and Port-A-Rig is born
Armed with a cursory knowledge of the fundamentals of video game streaming, as well as an awareness of the insane costs of buying my own high performance gaming PC, I did what any half sane product developer would do: built a service that let’s people rent high performance cloud gaming PCs to play Fortnite. Customer number one? Me.
The name of the service, “Port-A-Rig”, was inspired by my favorite Fortnite item, “Port-A-Fort” . A “Port-A-Fort” is a giant protective fort you can carry around the map and deploy any time you’re getting attacked by other players. “Port-A-Rig” is basically the same thing, except instead of a fort it’s a high performance gaming PC you can access from anywhere.
The first rig we built was made up of my dream components, and we put it in a data center in Los Angeles with a fiber internet connection. It would retail for around $3000 MSRP, and it includes an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti GPU, Intel I9–9900k CPU, 2x16G 3200 RAM, 970 Evo Plus 1TB SSD, Z390 Aorus Ultra MOBO, and 11gb Ultra Fast GDDR6 Memory.
I’ve played remotely on this rig around Los Angeles, and the experience is really good. As long as my internet connection is decent, I can stream from my Macbook at 120FPS with very high quality graphics. Macbooks usually suck for gaming, so I’m happy.
After I got this first rig up and running, I wanted to make it available to other users, so I wrote a basic web app, www.portarig.com, where Los Angeles based Fortnite fans can “unlock” our PCs and play on them remotely. Unlike some other game streaming services, I wanted the service to be cheap with no commitment. For now it costs $1.00 +$0.02 per minute for the base rig, $3.00+ $0.02 per minute for the performance rig, and $5.00 + $0.02 per minute for the pro rig. Since it’s a new technology, I see no reason to force people to lock themselves in to a subscription. I also hope to reduce prices even further as we grow.
When a user unlocks a Port-A-Rig, they receive an access code to drop in to their Port-A-Rig using the remote desktop software Anydesk. Once the user accesses the rig, they are in a secure Windows environment where the only applications they can access are Parsec and Epic Games Launcher. Once they’re in, a user can play for as long as they want.
When a user is done, they simply “lock” their Port-A-Rig via our web application. We then wipe all of the user’s data (including their Parsec and Epic Games Account Information), reset the rig’s access code, shut down the rig, and charge the user’s payment method. Think of it like Bird Scooters, except instead of unlocking/locking scooters, the user is unlocking/locking a high performance cloud gaming PC.
I wanted to be sure that anyone can access this service, so right now our PCs are accessible from Mac, PC, Linux, Raspberry Pi, or Android (e.g. chromebook). In theory, a user can unlock a Port-A-Rig from a $35 Raspberry Pi and play Fortnite on a $3000 gaming PC — and maybe only pay $2–3 for their session. It’s pretty dope.
The Future
I finally have access to the gaming PC that I want. I’m still not qualifying for the Fortnite World Cup any time soon, but at least I can now explore the gaming power lying dormant in my remaining eight fingers.
As for cloud gaming, I personally think the future looks really cool. All the big players (e.g. Google, Nvidia, Microsoft) are starting to get involved, and I’m hopeful we’ll find a way to make high performance PCs accessible to everyone in the world in a really short period of time.
As for Port-A-Rig, we’re doing everything we can to make high performance Fortnite game streaming accessible to as many people as possible. Our ambition is to focus on putting small numbers (10–100) of high performance gaming PCs in as many densely populated urban areas as possible. We’re just in Los Angeles now, but we’ll be expanding fast.
If you’re interested in learning more, renting a Port-A-Rig, chatting about cloud gaming, squadding up in Fortnite, or lamenting the demise of Mac’s Xbox, comment below, email me at scott@portarig.com, or check out our website at www.portarig.com.
