NVIDIA’s GeForce Now game streaming platform operates under a rather simple premise — play the games you already own on any supported device by streaming it from a remote server. That means you can play PC games on an Android Phone, NVIDIA Shield TV, or entry-level computer without the need to invest in expensive gaming hardware.
There’s just one problem — not every game publisher is cool with their titles being used this way. Shortly after GeForce Now graduated from beta earlier this year, Activision Blizzard prohibited its games from being played via the game streaming platform. A few months later, Warner Bros, XBOX Game Studios, Codemasters, and Klei Entertainment followed suit.
Now NVIDIA has announced that GeForce Now will be opt-in for game publishers moving forward, which should hopefully reduce the risk of games you can play today disappearing from your library tomorrow.
That said, it also means that the library of supported games is a bit smaller than it might otherwise have been.
NVIDIA says there are more than 500 games that are currently playable including popular titles such as Destiny 2, Fortnite, Rocket League, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege. But that leaves an awful lot of PC games that aren’t playable.
According to NVIDIA there are more games on the way though, with “more than 2,000 games already committed to the services.”
The current 500 game catalog is still a lot more than you get from Google’s Stadia game streaming service — but Stadia has a different business model from GeForce Now.
While NVIDIA’s service lets you stream PC games you’ve already paid for, Stadia lets you buy individual games to stream exclusively from its platform and/or pay for Stadia Pro and access a selection of games that are included in the subscription price.
GeForce Now offers free and paid plans. Free users can play for up to an hour at a time. But if you pay $5 per month for a Founders membership, you get extended session times, priority access, and support for RTX graphics. There’s also a 90-day free trial before you have to pay for a subscription.
via Engadget
Imagine a car maker telling the owner that he’s not allowed to use a certain road, threatening the road owner to not allow those cars to enter or they would sue him.
It’s still mind numbing that ‘developers’ think it’s in any way moral, legal, or right to refuse to allow software users purchase to run on a remote machine for streaming to said user.
The following is stupid, uneducated conjecture:
The issue is that software is not made of matter and is therefore copyrighted, and therefore is only ever owned by whoever wrote it. You don’t buy software, you buy a license to it.
When someone plays a game on geforce now, what happens is Nvidia, not you, installs it on THEIR computer. And Nvidia didn’t pay for a license.
Shadow doesn’t have this problem because you rent the computer, therefore it’s considered yours even if you never actually see it.
If I don’t sound as upset as I probably should, it’s because I have a giant glowing box on my desk that I prefer to use instead of streaming games.
I know the whole “bought a license” thing is a way around the first sale doctrine, but if I have a license, I should be able to play the game.
If they really made the EULA twisty enough to say “unless data is being cached somewhere, AHURHUR now you have to buy a new copy”… I actually doubt it would hold up in court, but maybe.
I certainly wouldn’t be making another purchase though. Or buying future copies of their games, because if they’re not going to let me play them, why would I keep giving them money?
That’s almost certainly not what’s going on here. If all you were doing is renting space on your own personal server, installing your game on it and running it, there wouldn’t be an issue, but given the instant installations I saw of very large complex games, NVIDIA is clearly doing some kind of caching of the game installations on the server, which adds a whole new dimension to the equation, given that users cannot just give NVIDIA permission to take copies files that were never in those users’ possession in the first place.
Even if NVIDIA was foolish enough to test it in court, I doubt they would win the case.