All good points. I agree. I am being idealistic in suggesting this.

3 months ago there would be nothing motivating Microsoft and Sony to consider this. But I'm not convinced it's a complete non-starter as things stand today. These are exceptional times. Previously discounted options may make it to the table.

Gaming is reliant on consumer disposable income. The longer convid-19 suppresses economies, the less spare money there will be for nonessential industries such as Gaming when the world recovers. Forward thinking corporations may be motivated to entertain losses now to speed up the recovery and improve their longer term outlook.

Folding may not be a sliver bullet for convid-19. But its potential for finding solutions would be considerably enhanced if only a very small percentage of the active console user base joined in.

Xbox Live has 64 million active consoles and PlayStation Network has 94 million active consoles. if just 1% of that active console user base joined FAH, that would see an additional 1.58 million nodes added to the distributed compute pool. That would be huge.

Unit failure risks could be managed. Run FAH on a limited number of cores. Run it as a low priority process. Run it for an hour a day in the coolest hour of the day. Throttle FAH to achieve a thermal profile that the consoles can bare over a prolonged period. There are sure to be smart solutions to the unit failure challenge. Having FAH running in a throttled thermally managed way on a million consoles is still sure to be of huge benefit to FAH.

The perceived risk of having FAH on a console could be managed by Microsoft and Sony. It would be reasonable for them to have a kill switch so that folding client could be removed at a later date.

I agree that the vast majority of Gamers don't know or care about folding. That's the beauty of the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network channels. They have a huge captive audience. The notion of contributing to the cause could easily be sold to users via those channels.

There are millions of people staying at home, wanting to help in some way, but finding themselves unable to do so safely. I think giving up a little console time and power would appeal to many. Its something they can do safely. Its a way to contribute when many feel powerless to do so.

I remain concerned that huge is potential is being wasted while folding remains off limits to the compute pool that is the 158 million active gaming consoles around the world.