Thursday, November 7th 2024
NVIDIA GeForce Now Gimps Game Streaming With New Monetization, Monthly Play Time Caps
NVIDIA today announced incoming changes to its GeForce Now game streaming service, some of which are not likely to sit well with gamers. The biggest, and likely most controversial change coming to GeForce Now is the addition of monthly playtime caps for all GeForce Now users, regardless of which plan they're on. According to the blog post announcing the changes, GeForce Now gamers will be limited to 100 hours of gameplay per month in addition to the daily playtime caps. NVIDIA will allow gamers who don't use their whole monthly cap to roll 15 hours of game time into the following month.
It's not all bad news, however, as NVIDIA also announced that it will be increasing the resolution and image quality of the GeForce Now Performance tier—previously Priority—from 1080p to 1440p. The Ultimate and Basic tiers remain unchanged in both name and feature set. NVIDIA says the playtime limit was necessary in order "to continue providing exceptional quality and speed—as well as shorter queue times." Of course players can buy extra playtime at a rate of $2.99 for 15 hours of GeForce Now Performance and $5.99 for 15 hours of GeForce Now Ultimate. The playtime limits will come into effect on January 1, 2025, and anyone that signs up for a paid GeForce Now subscription before then won't be subjected to the new playtime limits until January 2026.
NVIDIA says the playtime limits will be adequate for 94% of GeForce Now users, and advises gamers to use the GeForce Now Playtime Details dashboard to monitor their usage to avoid accidentally going over the maximum time. NVIDIA is also discounting the GeForce Now Day Pass by 25%, reducing the cost to $2.99 for Performance Day Pass and $5.99 for Ultimate Day Pass. This discount, in combination with NVIDIA's promise of delayed playtime limits for new users that subscribe before December 31, seem like an attempt to soften the blow of the new playtime requirements and garner new subscribers.
NVIDIA also announced a host of new games joining GeForce Now in November:
Source:
NVIDIA
It's not all bad news, however, as NVIDIA also announced that it will be increasing the resolution and image quality of the GeForce Now Performance tier—previously Priority—from 1080p to 1440p. The Ultimate and Basic tiers remain unchanged in both name and feature set. NVIDIA says the playtime limit was necessary in order "to continue providing exceptional quality and speed—as well as shorter queue times." Of course players can buy extra playtime at a rate of $2.99 for 15 hours of GeForce Now Performance and $5.99 for 15 hours of GeForce Now Ultimate. The playtime limits will come into effect on January 1, 2025, and anyone that signs up for a paid GeForce Now subscription before then won't be subjected to the new playtime limits until January 2026.
NVIDIA also announced a host of new games joining GeForce Now in November:
- Planet Coaster 2 (New release on Steam, Nov. 6)
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate (New release on Steam, Nov. 6)
- Empire of the Ants
- Unrailed 2: Back on Track
- TCG Card Shop Simulator
- StarCraft II
- StarCraft Remastered
73 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce Now Gimps Game Streaming With New Monetization, Monthly Play Time Caps
(The PS5 Pro just changed the game by now having an additional 2GB of system memory (separate to the GDDR pool), for the system to reside in, thus freeing up additional texture memory for games, with the hard limit that Sony imposed increased to 14GB for texture and game data... So a 16GB card really will be the lowest limit for upcoming games, surpassing the previous lowest limit of a 12GB card minimum)
Please don't waste my time and just mute or block me, ok old man?
This service just doesn't cater to the needs of people such as us, I suppose.
GeForce Now or Abya Go (both operated by the same brand), Amazon Luna, xCloud (and the late Google Stadia) can be run off your smart TV, phone or anywhere that can receive and decode a video stream, really. The primary issue is bandwidth (and even at perfect networking conditions, it's a 4:2:0, usually no more than 15 Mbps video stream - so quality suffers), ping and data usage.
Steam and GOG have turned out to be the best as most of the Games I play on Steam can be played Offline. GOG is an ode to the roots of PC Gaming. I am sure some of us still have Physical Copies of our Games (I know I do) and the flexibility of GOG is highly refreshing. I remember wanting to see how Witcher 3 would work on my HTPC. I copied the Game to a USB drive and used that and the Game loaded up just fine. The performance was not good but the fact that anyone could use that USB drive and play Witcher 3 is very refreshing.
They should charge 10x that. Nvidia owners will pay it ;)
For the weekend warrior that plugs into COD for 8-10hrs it's roughly 20hrs/wk.
The streamer that keeps pushing for this and that commits to around 4-8hrs/day.
So the streamers might have a problem. The rest, probably not.
I used to daily VR stuff for 6-12hr days, averaging 2000hrs/yr for 4 years in one game with over 15K total hrs in SteamVR.
I'm not worried about this monetization thing since I'm team red but it really does make me think about making something out of all of this to make some serious $$$$$.