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.
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
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.
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.
I already have to invest heavily into high end hardware for video editing/work and my current setup is not ideal for games. I have no desire to buy a second computer just to game. I pay $5/mo for geforce now and it’s a fantastic way for me to play PC games without owning a PC. Yeah I don’t “own” the computer, but at $60/yr who gives a shit? I’d have to use it for 15 years to even approach what I’d spend on a computer that plays as well as the remote rig I use. I get 1080p @60fps using medium/high graphics and great response time.
Additionally, I am able to use it on my phone and tablet with a controller. Which means those are games I’m not buying on mobile (plus I can play a ton of games that my phone/tablet can’t play, like Valheim). Plus I share the account with my brother who barely plays games at all but likes to from time to time. Dropping $700-$1000 on a gaming computer does not make sense for him.
Just because you don’t have a valid use case doesn’t mean no one else does. And GFN’s existence isn’t stopping you from owning and playing on your own hardware.
As for eroding consumers’ ability to own anything, there is no world in which cloud gaming replaces owning hardware locally in any meaningful way. It’s a part of the ecosystem. You can’t even download the games like on movie streaming services, you need a strong and reliable connection or it’s unplayable. You can’t use it on commutes, you can’t use it on planes, you can’t even use it reliably walking around your home. The inability to play without internet + latency + lower quality/fps means your computer isn’t going the way of the DVD player anytime soon.
Let me also ask you this: why does everyone need to own a computer to play games?
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).
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?
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Is this their cloud gaming service? It was free?
There is a free tier which limits you to 1 hour playtime sessions and does not let you use RTX effects.
Yes. There are tiers and the free tier is limited to 1 hour play sessions.
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.
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
As Linus Torvalds eloquently put it:
At least the reverse engineered foss client is better than the original
Yes long life sunshine and moonlight
Could have just left it there
I can get a free gforce? And I have to watch ads in exchange? No? So there’s no free users.
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
Oh, so it’s a streaming gaming service? Where you don’t need a gforce card?
Correct, so long your device supports streaming video like Youtube, you may use it.
It’s amazing how scummy and gimmicky Nvidia is and the fact that they are, in fact, a real company with real products.
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.
Whoops, edited the headline, thanks
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).
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.
You already don’t own your games.
It’s not exactly hard for me to make “backups” of most games I can download, as the DRM is usually cracked within weeks or months of release.
A single player game that is exclusive to streaming would just be gone forever the instant it gets delisted.
deleted by creator
I already have to invest heavily into high end hardware for video editing/work and my current setup is not ideal for games. I have no desire to buy a second computer just to game. I pay $5/mo for geforce now and it’s a fantastic way for me to play PC games without owning a PC. Yeah I don’t “own” the computer, but at $60/yr who gives a shit? I’d have to use it for 15 years to even approach what I’d spend on a computer that plays as well as the remote rig I use. I get 1080p @60fps using medium/high graphics and great response time.
Additionally, I am able to use it on my phone and tablet with a controller. Which means those are games I’m not buying on mobile (plus I can play a ton of games that my phone/tablet can’t play, like Valheim). Plus I share the account with my brother who barely plays games at all but likes to from time to time. Dropping $700-$1000 on a gaming computer does not make sense for him.
Just because you don’t have a valid use case doesn’t mean no one else does. And GFN’s existence isn’t stopping you from owning and playing on your own hardware.
As for eroding consumers’ ability to own anything, there is no world in which cloud gaming replaces owning hardware locally in any meaningful way. It’s a part of the ecosystem. You can’t even download the games like on movie streaming services, you need a strong and reliable connection or it’s unplayable. You can’t use it on commutes, you can’t use it on planes, you can’t even use it reliably walking around your home. The inability to play without internet + latency + lower quality/fps means your computer isn’t going the way of the DVD player anytime soon.
Let me also ask you this: why does everyone need to own a computer to play games?
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
because you have to extrapolate.
publishers don’t want you to own games just lease them so they can deprecate games and make you upgrade when they want to.
also no more mods or cheatengine to enhance the game or bypass microtransactions
GeForce Now doesn’t lease games. Just let’s you run games you already own on other stores using cloud hardware.
not every game you own can be used this way.
Okay? You still can’t “lease games” from them.
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).
I don’t mind this. It’s unreasonable to expect them to provide a free service forever without any kind of monetization.
Are they implying that soon they’re gonna charge you a subscription just to have one of their fuckin’ graphics cards?
This is about GeForce Now, their streaming service.
No they’re not
No? I really hope this isn’t a serious question, because I can’t imagine how you’d come to this conclusion, if you read the full sentence.
giggles in 7900 xtx
People use Nvidia for anything other then a video card and installing drivers without their useless bloat?
I have never once attempted to use them for gaming and never will aside from the hardware. Even then, 1080ti ftw
Sure will.
(Also, TIL that GeForce NOW has a free tier. I assumed it was one of those “pay $10 a month” kinda things even at the lowest level)
Honestly fair to show ads in the free tier. They could also simply not have a free tier.
Because more players will leave the queue by closing the ads in disgust.
Ha, They just won’t count watching ads as waiting time.
I mean, the more revenue free players can generate, the more reason they have to keep them in
If you otherwise think queues will be shorter because people will quit over disgust of ads boy do I have news for you
I mean it practically doesn’t. I tried it a few times and the queue was so long that I just gave up. And now they want you to watch ads.
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.
That sounds like a bad design…
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.
Yes but you can allow the user to have a choice while also having sensible defaults.
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?