NVIDIA GeForce Now launched out of beta recently, and it really set itself up as a serious competitor to Google Stadia. It works on more devices, already has a free tier, it's cheaper, and it has a much bigger library. What's not to like?
Well, despite that killer launch, NVIDIA has had a bit of a fiasco on its hands ever since.
Publishers pull their games from GeForce Now
The service itself hasn't really changed. You can still stream games you already own from a few different game stores on PC, and it still works on PCs, Macs, tons of Android phones, whatever.
But what has changed is game availability. For whatever reason, it seems like quite a few publishers aren't thrilled with the service. In just a couple weeks, we've seen literally tons of games get yanked from the service, so even if you were playing, say, Skyrim when GeForce Now launched out of beta, you can't do that anymore since Bethesda has taken their ball and gone home.
Activision Blizzard was one of the first to leave the service after the public launch, which includes some really popular titles like the Call of Duty franchise, Overwatch, the remasters of Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, among tons and tons of others. Bethesda followed suit, yanking their games outside of Wolfenstein: Youngblood, strangely enough. That nixed The Elder Scrolls, making GeForce Now literally the only platform that you can't play Skyrim on, plus things like Rage and Doom. You can play Doom: Eternal on Stadia, but it's not happening on GeForce Now.
And that's where some of these questions get raised. Is Bethesda leaving the service because they've got a deal set up with Stadia? Remember that Doom: Eternal was hyped up as a Stadia title, and these are clearly competing services, despite their differences. Activision Blizzard makes a little less sense, since they don't have a deal with anyone else, and you'd think that they'd prefer to just have more players on their games. Most of Overwatch's revenue comes from lootboxes, anyway, and you only sell those with a big playerbase.
The decision to yank also makes the player experience worse, since there's really no quick way to tell if a game is supported outside of searching for it specifically on GeForce Now. If you launch Steam through GeForce Now and try to buy it a game, it's going to let you, regardless of whether or not you can actually stream it through the service.
So what's going on? Do these publishers want a cut of the monthly price of GeForce Now? It's not like a Netflix service or a game store like Stadia, it's not like they're missing out on people buying games. You have to own the game in the first place to even be able to play it on GeForce Now; all the service does is just give you an extra way to play games you already own.
The future of cloud game streaming
We don't have an answer for that, unfortunately. Big publishers do tend to be kind of short-sighted, so this could just be some companies thinking they should be able to make their own platforms, but they'll come around when they figure out that managing a gigantic game streaming cloud platform is insanely expensive. Or maybe something like GeForce Now is more doomed than Stadia.
As it stands, if you're planning on subscribing to GeForce Now, just remember that you're going to be missing a few major publishers, like Activision Blizzard, Bethesda, Square Enix, Capcom, and EA, which are probably responsible for at least some of the games you've played.
There are still some big names on board, like Ubisoft, Bandai Namco, and CD Projekt Red, although some are half-in, like Take Two. You can play Bioshock or Civilization, but not Grand Theft Auto, despite Take Two publishing all of them. And, again, GTA V makes most of its money from microtransactions… so you'd figure Take Two would want as many people playing their game as possible. But what do I know?
We're very early on in the days of cloud game streaming. There are bound to be some growing pains, so buckle if up if you plan on staying invested before it really matures and the industry finds its feet.
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