The rise of the virtual workday

The shape of the Parsec network has changed over the past year. Our customer base has grown as more people discovered Parsec as a helpful way to get closer to friends and family, organize remote tournaments, and broadcast community events. Enabling this social connective tissue is one of the key motivations for Parsec.

An additional development is the new ways in which people have started to use our technology. Over the course of the past year, we’ve observed how users started to use Parsec to connect to non-gaming applications. Known as self-connections (connections made to your own computer), we’ve always seen people use our technology to connect to their games server while traveling or to play AAA games from bed. But the pandemic brought forth another application: remote work.

Looking  at the activity of 2,000 anonymous, randomly selected accounts from before the pandemic to February 2021 we noticed that, on average, the number of connections increased roughly tenfold over the entire period. Interestingly, this growth hits an upper asymptote. The self connections stay at a steady state, fluctuating a bit from month to month, but hovering right around 20 connections a month. Why can’t we crack past it? What’s special about the number 20?

It’s the average number of weekdays in a month. Better known as work days.

Going beyond just gaming, a growing number of accounts started to  use Parsec to log work hours. The moment the pandemic hit, these connections rapidly accelerated. Connect to a GPU enabled computer from home to finish some video editing, or polish up an animation, or work on a character design when the inspiration felt just right. They used Parsec the way any marketer or web developer might use their work laptop. Bring it home, occasionally use it to respond to an email or squash a bug, and you’re good to go to bed before commuting in the next day.

It also presented us with a new challenge and put our tech to the test: we’re good for the one off task here and there, but can we hold up for an 8-hour day in the now virtual office?

We’re happy to report that, yes, Parsec can.  In a relatively short time period, Parsec has evolved into a service that allows users to establish a quick and easy connection with their work machine. Especially among high-end users that rely on computation force, we’ve been excited to watch what has become a daily habit. Game developers, filmmakers, creatives, and architects have started to rely on Parsec (and Parsec for Teams) to get their job done. We couldn’t be more excited.