How is it scammy or gimmicky to put ads on a product you don’t pay for? I guess I’m just missing the disconnect here. This service costs Nvidia money to run.
While I have no interest in using a service like this, I understand why they are doing this. I would imagine that a service like this probably costs a lot to run and it looks like they are adding them in a sensible way. It’s not like how a lot of mobile games are where the game just randomly stops in the middle of game-play to show you an ad.
FYI, this is not about free GPUs. “GeForce NOW” is a streaming service.
Headline would’ve been less confusing if it had the service name in quotes or something. I can see how people might read that and assume it means free, ad-supported GPUs. It does not.
So I got the email today and I just want to share my experience.
Im with NVIDIA on this one, let me explain. I’ve been using the service for the past 2 years (half of it’s lifetime since release 4 years ago) and I thought to myself from the get go “this is unsubtainable” and that I would have nowhere to game on high performance after they inevitably shut down the free plan. I was wrong, and this does translate to a good experience
To elaborate, queues in free tier have 3 states, the first one being “go grab a snack and you’ll be back to the game launcher” which is when the queue has a little over 100 people that took up to 10 minutes to clear, this has been the most common in my experience due to my region’s timezone being the most far apart from the people in my continent (America) and thus I get to play when most people arent and such the queue is very accessible
The second state is “everyone is asleep you get in immediately” which I just happen to incur into every other weekend I devote to gaming till 4 AM (which would be like till 9 AM for the rest of the continent)
And the third and most uncommon scenario I have face is “A game is very popular right now, everyone is playing regardless of timezone” which has happened a number of times I can count with my both hands, the most recent one being past september the servers were so saturated it took hours to get in even at night time of my region. THIS HOWEVER DID NOT STOP ME FROM USING THE SERVICE, why you may ask, well the answer is more “how”, because the service allows you to pick manually a region to play in, I instead of defaulting to my local server, manually chose one in Europe, and sure enough Europe had many available servers, I could play in again like if it was the first state, this obviously came with a slight increase in input delay but given the PvE nature of my games, I went unbothered with it. Until things calmed down on my region and I could go back to my server
Conclusion is, GFN Free Tier is absolutely worth the cost, and having abused the shit out of it this is good news, it means they really dont intend to shut it down for the foreseeable future which is the most important part, but also it might improve thanks to the generated revenue where there previously was none. Unlike Youtube and Spotify this seems to be non-interruptive which is welcomed as well, obviously you cant just pause a game midway for an ad, they understand this is not how things work.
instead of defaulting to my local server, manually chose one in Europe, and sure enough Europe had many available servers, I could play in again like if it was the first state
How could it be? Im sure everyone here is no stranger to automated systems being fucky, if anything giving the user the choice is considerably in favour of them. Besides, im subject to the same system as in my region, I got access to unnocupied servers due to time zone differences.
Assuming you read my entire parent comment… what would a sensible default do in that case? Put me in a less crowded region compromising quality as I mentioned?
It was straight-up free (as in: no tiers, just free) for a long time to early adopters of the Nvidia Shield. I can't remember when it was introduced but I think it was with the first iteration of Shield TV.
Cloud gaming is a plague. More fuel for the “you will own nothing and be happy” camp. Let it die. GeForce Now was at least one of the better options since you just use their servers to play games from your owned library, but the whole concept is a plague nonetheless. Let streaming nonsense die. Streaming from your own PC is the only streaming solution that doesn’t exist to weaken consumer ownership of their gaming experience.
Yeah I have to disagree with you on that one. I understand where you’re coming from but you can game on high end equipment without buying it. Not to mention the situation with heat build-up in my room. Basically sharing the costs with 100 other users.
When my current PC is dead in 5 years or whatever I will probably transition to cloud gaming (and SteamDeck).
you can game on high end equipment without buying it.
This is how they get you to give up ownership of your games. I’m fine with it as an option, but I fear that one day publishers will decide it should be the only option.
A single player game that is exclusive to streaming would just be gone forever the instant it gets delisted.
I agree with this, but what does it have to do with GeForce Now? They don’t make any games exclusive on this platform… nor do they have rights to many other games that are exclusives. Beyond that, none of the games on GeForce Now are owned by the user because the games are available through Steam or Epic mostly.
Im seriously intersted on how is Cloud Gaming (in the way Geforce does it) part of the “you will own nothing and be happy” issue, im not saying the trope isnt real, im saying that I cant think how does it fit into this concept. On my view this is akin as going into a Cyber Cafe you could walk down the street anyday, you dont own anything either but your money’s worth isnt sailing without you receiving what you paid for
Well, that makes sense for the most part, but there’s the important detail that there are streaming services that grant you a fully uncontrolled rig, I just cant think of any that are free. In fact, Geforce Now used to do this, until legal issues arised from a clause being extremely specific making users unable to legally play on a device they werent physically in contact with, real shitty but allegedly not Nvidia’s fault or the cloud streaming service as a whole.
It still has more upsides than your average X as a service. Beyond what the OP already said, it lets you jump right into a game without having to wait for it to download, which is pretty big when games regularly take >100GB of space, even more so if you like to switch between different games often.
If you try a game and decide you don’t like it, you may as well end up using up less bandwidth than if you had downloaded, not to mention zero waiting time (unless there’s a queue, but usually there isn’t assuming that you have an actual paid subscription and it isn’t an absurd peak demand).
Fuck NVIDIA for shutting down GameStream. Killing it had no impact on their servers and this was a tactic to coerce customers to subscribe to their streaming service
You can get it, and you have to watch no ads, as of right now, it’s been 4 years running like that im sincerely apalled this is breaking in now, I would have thought the current form to be unsubtainable long ago but i’ve been playing on the free tier 2 years by now
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