The endgame of all these subscription services is always the same. They make you reliant, and then they jack prices and reduce service.
At this point, there are enough exemplars that anyone still buying in is just not paying attention.
My buddy was toying with investing in this service. I cautioned him that he’d be a the mercy of a company that isn’t at all consumer friendly. Case and point
An expense or purchase is not an investment.
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How so? The games aren’t purchased on GeForce Now and he could just cancel his subscription if they changed the service in a way he didn’t like.
He doesn’t have the hardware to support non-streaming so he’d effectively have no way of playing them if the service continued to get worse. I suggested he pay upfront for hardware that can play the games he wants without being dependent on nvidia
That’s fair, but he would be able to play the games in the meantime. And since hardware generally gets cheaper as time passes, if he could set aside more than the subscription fee each month to save for his own hardware, he’d be able to game in the meantime. And if he ever had to cancel it, he’d be closer to being able to buy his own hardware than he is today - meaning more time total spent gaming.
Good points all around
Worth considering he could also use GeForce now while saving for a Steam Deck. Used ones go on sale for under $300 pretty frequently.
I actually suggested he get a deck instead, which he is considering.
It’s a fantastic option at this point. I’ve been a GeForce Now user since 15 or 16 (whenever they launched the ShieldTV beta) and it’s… ok? You can still run it on deck as well of there’s any concern.
Genuinely when there was actually some competition in this space, GeForce NOW was actually the consumer friendly one
Guess we have another case study in why competition results in worse outcomes for the customer in its eventual conclusion
i mean its not like Microsofts XCloud is an unusable service. they just have a completely different monetization approach.
The big win for GeForce NOW was you could fire up games from your steam library—you didn’t need to directly invest in a service which might die for your ownership of a game
more or less yes, that was its main advantage, but most of the cloud doesnt really compete there.
Shadow cloud gaming is an example that competes with nvidia on that front if game ownership is part of your concern, but its not the main concern for all cloud services.
This fucking sucks, even if 100 hrs/month isn’t crazy unreasonable.
It will be 90 eventually.
This is why I dont care about game streaming. These corpos want us more reliant on them so they can suck out more money.
This could be reasonable depending on the limit. I think 1 hour limit for free tier is generous, 6 hour limit for medium tier is reasonable if most users play less than 6 hours per session. But 8 hours for the top tier sucks balls and is a major scam.
There’s probably a small portion of people that just leave it on so they never have to wait in queue to get back on.
An AFK kick seems simple enough to stop most of those situations.
Mouse wiggler, auto clicker, not hard to bypass any of those.
Yeah some people would do that.
