Before ringing in the new year, GeForce NOW is taking a look back at a 2023 full of top-notch gaming. Explore GeForce NOW's year in review, which brought more hit games, improved service features and the launch of the Ultimate membership tier. Plus, GFN Thursday is raising a toast to the GeForce NOW community by delivering more than 40 new games to stream from the cloud.

Wrapping It Up
It's been an amazing year of cloud gaming. The launch of the Ultimate tier brought high-performance cloud gaming across North America and Europe, streaming from newly rolled out GeForce RTX 4080 SuperPODs. For the first time in the cloud, members could stream up to 240 frames per second, or 4K 120 FPS on the native PC and Mac apps, and experience support for ultrawide resolutions for the smoothest and most immersive gameplay - all thanks to the powerful NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. To prove the power of the cloud, NVIDIA gave gamers the ultimate test of latency on KovaaK's, a latency-sensitive, first-person-shooter aim trainer.

Time to gear up, hunters - Capcom's Monster Hunter: World joins the GeForce NOW library, bringing members the ultimate hunting experience on any device. It's all part of an adventurous week, with nearly a dozen new games joining the cloud gaming service.

A Whole New World
Join the Fifth Fleet on an epic adventure to the New World, a land full of monstrous creatures, in the acclaimed action role-playing game (RPG) Monster Hunter: World. It's the latest in the series to join the cloud, following Monster Hunter Rise. Members can unleash their inner hunter and slay ferocious monsters in a living, breathing ecosystem. Explore the unique landscape and encounter diverse monster inhabitants in ferocious hunting battles. Hunt alone or with up to three other players, and use materials collected from fallen foes to craft new gear and take on bigger, badder beasts. Step up to the Quest Board and hunt monsters in the cloud at up to 4K resolution and 120 frames per second as an Ultimate member - or discover the New World at ultrawide resolutions. Members don't need to wait for downloads or worry about storage space, and can take the action with them across nearly all devices.

Steam has recently published their Best of 2020 awards which highlight the best selling, and most played games of 2020. The awards include six categories including Top Sellers, Top New Releases, Top Selling VR Games, Top Early Access Graduates, Most Played Games, and Top Controller Games. The 100 games in each list are ranked as Platinum (1st - 12th), Gold (13th - 24th), Silver (25th - 40th), and Bronze (41st - 100th) with each rank of games being randomly sorted.

Starting with the Top Sellers we have Grand Theft Auto V, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, DOOM Eternal, Monster Hunter: World, Dota 2, Among Us, Destiny 2, PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive all taking the top platinum rating.

Capcom's "Monster Hunter: World" opened to generally positive reviews on the backs of strong gameplay mechanics, inventory system, and an addictive yet simple RPG quest, although we found it falling slightly short in the eye-candy department, as its visuals and texture-quality felt dated and a good 3-5 years behind what's considered cutting-edge today. Capcom alleviated some of this criticism by releasing a free and optional high-resolution texture pack for the game. The "High Resolution Textures Pack" is an optional feature-update that adds not just significantly higher resolution textures for the game, but also the new "TAA+FXAA" anti-aliasing mode under graphics settings. Rock Paper Shotgun comments that it has also observed some refinements in some of the visual effects. You can get the update from the "DLC" section of your game's Steam page, or this page.

The nominees for the 2018 Game Awards have been announced, and... It seems that us PC gamers are missing out. I myself am missing out, despite owning my own PS4 system; there's just so much time one can have in between - the other kind of - life. However, the range of nominees that are exclusive to Sony's system is relentless in showing us that there may be life on the other side of the pond.

There are a whole lot of categories for this one, so I'll take my editor's discretion in calling your attention to the Game of the Year, Best Game Direction, and Best Narrative categories, where exclusives to Sony's platform God of War and Marvel's Spider-Man are nominated in all three categories. Detroit: Become Human, another PS4 exclusive, eeked its way into both Best Game Direction and Best Narrative categories as well, and console exclusive (for now) Red Dead Redemption 2 is nominated in all three categories. You can check out the main Game Awards 2018 page for all the categories, including Best Ongoing Game and Best Score/Music - up to a total of 30 differentiating categories.

In the never-ending war between crackers and DRM company Denuvo, the latest victim has been (as it always tends to be) the later's efforts. Version 5.2 of Denuvo's anti-tampering protection has been cracked, opening the floodgates to cracked versions of Mega Man 11 and just-released Football Manager 2019.

Considering the proximity of release for both Hitman 2 (November 13) and Battlefield V (November 20th), it's likely both of those games will ship with the same 5.2 version. The group that cracked Denuvo's 5.2 protection are using the moniker FCKDRM'', which is likely a homage to GOG's FCK DRM movement. This, I'm sure, is well above hat the initiative's objectives were, and is sure to be frowned upon.

(Update: Apparently, this isn't an EVGA-exclusive campaign; as it has been noted in the comments, NVIDIA themselves have launched a page with this same promotion and conditions for the free copy of Monster Hunter: World. It appears EVGA just added its own branding to an NVIDIA and partner-wide promotion).

EVGA has just announced a promotion where users that buy qualifying 10-series NVIDIA graphics cards (EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, 1070, or 1060 6 GB) can get a digital copy of Monster Hunter: World for free. Monster Hunter: World released to critical and consumer acclaim not that many months ago, and was received quite well in our own performance review. The game doesn't incorporate any of the 20-series exclusive RTX graphics effects and raytracing processing, so an offering with the 10-series cards isn't a bad deal - especially as it's likely to help move volume of the previous-gen cards quicker along EVGA's warehouses.

Monster Hunter: World has cemented itself as this year's biggest Steam launch (at least hitherto). The popular game which has been one of the most popular console launches of this generation has again done it on the PC platform, where it achieved an astounding 239,779 concurrent players a few hours after launch, more than any Japanese game ever achieved - and this comes at a time that's after the Dark Souls phenomenon. This year's previous biggest launch was Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which pulled in nearly 96,000 players - a far cry from Monster Hunter: World's achievement.

Here's our performance analysis and port impressions article.