Cloud gaming is a plague. More fuel for the “you will own nothing and be happy” camp. Let it die. GeForce Now was at least one of the better options since you just use their servers to play games from your owned library, but the whole concept is a plague nonetheless. Let streaming nonsense die. Streaming from your own PC is the only streaming solution that doesn’t exist to weaken consumer ownership of their gaming experience.
Yeah I have to disagree with you on that one. I understand where you’re coming from but you can game on high end equipment without buying it. Not to mention the situation with heat build-up in my room. Basically sharing the costs with 100 other users.
When my current PC is dead in 5 years or whatever I will probably transition to cloud gaming (and SteamDeck).
you can game on high end equipment without buying it.
This is how they get you to give up ownership of your games. I’m fine with it as an option, but I fear that one day publishers will decide it should be the only option.
A single player game that is exclusive to streaming would just be gone forever the instant it gets delisted.
I agree with this, but what does it have to do with GeForce Now? They don’t make any games exclusive on this platform… nor do they have rights to many other games that are exclusives. Beyond that, none of the games on GeForce Now are owned by the user because the games are available through Steam or Epic mostly.
Im seriously intersted on how is Cloud Gaming (in the way Geforce does it) part of the “you will own nothing and be happy” issue, im not saying the trope isnt real, im saying that I cant think how does it fit into this concept. On my view this is akin as going into a Cyber Cafe you could walk down the street anyday, you dont own anything either but your money’s worth isnt sailing without you receiving what you paid for
Well, that makes sense for the most part, but there’s the important detail that there are streaming services that grant you a fully uncontrolled rig, I just cant think of any that are free. In fact, Geforce Now used to do this, until legal issues arised from a clause being extremely specific making users unable to legally play on a device they werent physically in contact with, real shitty but allegedly not Nvidia’s fault or the cloud streaming service as a whole.
It still has more upsides than your average X as a service. Beyond what the OP already said, it lets you jump right into a game without having to wait for it to download, which is pretty big when games regularly take >100GB of space, even more so if you like to switch between different games often.
If you try a game and decide you don’t like it, you may as well end up using up less bandwidth than if you had downloaded, not to mention zero waiting time (unless there’s a queue, but usually there isn’t assuming that you have an actual paid subscription and it isn’t an absurd peak demand).
So I got the email today and I just want to share my experience.
Im with NVIDIA on this one, let me explain. I’ve been using the service for the past 2 years (half of it’s lifetime since release 4 years ago) and I thought to myself from the get go “this is unsubtainable” and that I would have nowhere to game on high performance after they inevitably shut down the free plan. I was wrong, and this does translate to a good experience
To elaborate, queues in free tier have 3 states, the first one being “go grab a snack and you’ll be back to the game launcher” which is when the queue has a little over 100 people that took up to 10 minutes to clear, this has been the most common in my experience due to my region’s timezone being the most far apart from the people in my continent (America) and thus I get to play when most people arent and such the queue is very accessible
The second state is “everyone is asleep you get in immediately” which I just happen to incur into every other weekend I devote to gaming till 4 AM (which would be like till 9 AM for the rest of the continent)
And the third and most uncommon scenario I have face is “A game is very popular right now, everyone is playing regardless of timezone” which has happened a number of times I can count with my both hands, the most recent one being past september the servers were so saturated it took hours to get in even at night time of my region. THIS HOWEVER DID NOT STOP ME FROM USING THE SERVICE, why you may ask, well the answer is more “how”, because the service allows you to pick manually a region to play in, I instead of defaulting to my local server, manually chose one in Europe, and sure enough Europe had many available servers, I could play in again like if it was the first state, this obviously came with a slight increase in input delay but given the PvE nature of my games, I went unbothered with it. Until things calmed down on my region and I could go back to my server
Conclusion is, GFN Free Tier is absolutely worth the cost, and having abused the shit out of it this is good news, it means they really dont intend to shut it down for the foreseeable future which is the most important part, but also it might improve thanks to the generated revenue where there previously was none. Unlike Youtube and Spotify this seems to be non-interruptive which is welcomed as well, obviously you cant just pause a game midway for an ad, they understand this is not how things work.
instead of defaulting to my local server, manually chose one in Europe, and sure enough Europe had many available servers, I could play in again like if it was the first state
How could it be? Im sure everyone here is no stranger to automated systems being fucky, if anything giving the user the choice is considerably in favour of them. Besides, im subject to the same system as in my region, I got access to unnocupied servers due to time zone differences.
Assuming you read my entire parent comment… what would a sensible default do in that case? Put me in a less crowded region compromising quality as I mentioned?
Fuck NVIDIA for shutting down GameStream. Killing it had no impact on their servers and this was a tactic to coerce customers to subscribe to their streaming service
PC player complaining about the cost of a PlayStation is new to me. Isn’t it normally the other way around? Isn’t a PS5 about as expensive as a decent GPU alone?
Yeah the PS5 is pretty reasonably priced for what you get. I think the issue is two fold:
We already have really expensive machines that probably play games much better than the PS5 in frames and quality so buying another machine for a handful of games is just not in the cards.
Many of us much prefer keyboard/mouse and using controllers is really hard when you’ve not done it in many years.
I think we just wish Playstation was more friendly to PC players and not have these long exclusives (they’ve gotten a lot better recently though). Microsoft for example is a lot friendlier to PC players than Sony. Pretty much all MS first party games are on PC pretty much day one and many of them are on GamePass day one as well.
That’s all true and it’s never really bothered me because, possible hot take incoming, PS exclusives are pretty milquetoast. I will concede that Sony’s first party studios have honed their ability to make “open world third person action game with crafting and stealth elements” with impressive consistency, but that’s the most common genre of AAA game and IMO Sony isn’t even making the best ones, just accessible and consistently above average ones.
If you want that kind of game you have a zillion options on every platform.
but TotK is just GMod with Zelda models and poorly written furry fanfic. Some great elements there, but nothing special, and I'd say it fits in your 'above average open world games'
Zelda is definitely a pretty mid tier open world game, both botw and tolk but it gets a pass cause it’s Zelda. And it’s pretty fun as well in terms of abilities and combat
Not just the year, it is in the top 50 of all time. Beating games like Portal 2, TP, MM, Skyrim, TW3. Also, what has come out this year that hasn't flopped, been a remaster/release, or isn't FFXVI?
I just want Bloodborne, Ghost of Tsushima, and FFXVI on PC. The first is a wash, the second might be coming soon, and the third needs a year to be ported.
Yeah while MS does also “own” the PC ecosystem via Windows, I’d bet MS probably makes more money off of an individual Xbox player than a PC player which should make them a bit less friendly to PC.
For starters:
Steam takes a 30% cut of all sales
Sales and prices are usually much better on Steam than consoles so a lot of people wait for that number to drop over time
For most multiplayer games you need to pay for Xbox Gold which is upwards of $50-$60 a year (or gamepass which is even more, though you get more out of it).
You have to buy the console (this really depends on if MS actually makes money on console sales though) to play the game too.
Microsoft doesn’t have to put their games on PC if they don’t want to and in the past they kind of didn’t (no one liked GFWL). They could totally go the exclusive route again, but I think MS knows that Xbox die-hard will buy an Xbox console and obviously buy the games on the xbox store for whatever it cost. PC players will also buy it if it’s a good game and a good price and, this is crucial, is on Steam.
PC players are an untapped resource of potential customers; That’s why Sony finally decided to also cave and put their games on Steam. Money is money, but the difference is MS is betting big on GamePass and good-will right now since they are behind Sony in sales. I think because they’re behind Sony and trying to earn that good-will back, MS becomes more friendly to PC by putting their games on PC day one and on GamePass day one whereas Sony is still going with the 1-year (or more) PS5 exclusivity thing.
The interesting thing will be if MS ever gets back on top again, who knows what that looks like, but it’ll probably suck.
I agree with most of your points. Just wanted to point out that for MS games Linux compatibility is not planned. Not saying that other studios are supporting Linux, very few are but I wanted say that MS is Windows friendly not PC friendly.
That’s totally fair. I’m not sure where MS’ steam games fall on “working with linux” via Proton. I haven’t heard them being actively hostile like Bungie is with Destiny, but I’m not sure where that’s at.
Your last line reminds me of AMD Vs Intel battle. AMD was cheaper and better value for a lot of years till they were lagging behind Intel on performance. But the moment they attained parity with Intel with their Zen CPUs, they also started pricing their CPUs higher than Intel and also completely abandoned the low end market. Intel’s cheapest 12th gen CPU is currently more than 20% cheaper than AMDs cheapest Ryzen 5000 series CPU here in India.
If PC is your platform of choice and you’re looking for alternative then yea, ps5 or any other console won’t fulfill that need. If you’re looking for a complimentary console then ps5/switch are perfect depending on what you’re looking for in exclusives and functionality.
I agree with that for most people. I’m a bit of a weirdo who has a PC and Xbox Series X. I bought the X purely so I can play Destiny from my recliner chair on days where I just can’t sit at my desk anymore. It (along with GamePass) has also benefited my wife immensely. She’s played so many games on GamePass on the Xbox, it’s great.
Most recently I tried to make my PC hybrid between desk and TV and the experience was so frustratingly bad. Trying to send audio to 2 different places was bad (even with Voicemeter) and then the monitors kept getting all screwed up because of the TV being sometimes seen and sometimes not. It was a terrible experience. Eventually I said screw it and built a completely dedicated PC for my tv couch gaming and it honestly works pretty damn great.
It’s more that a PC capable of playing games is something a lot of PC gamers are going to have regardless of whether the PS5 has exclusives they want to play or not. Its something they might go onto use for stuff like Blender or video editing or any other productivity based work. So the idea of dropping the cost of a GPU just to play exclusive games is not the most enticing, since it’s not hardware that is going to do anything but be able to play games.
So console are cheap to someone that will not have a device that is satisfactory for gaming, but when you already do and will the price is steep. Since at the point you may prefer to spend that money towards more PC upgrades, or buying other hardware that offers something that is lacking in your set up like nice speakers or a VR headset or headphones or just save the money.
So for a console to catch the eye of a PC gamer I think the switch has actually done the best job. It’s not just another display dependent hardware that PC owners already have and will have, but something portable. It offers a unique hardware experience that makes it more alluring to buy than just gatewalled games being what makes it stand out.
That’s why I just bought a steam deck to supplement my PC. I can sit on the couch and play, or take it with me and play wherever I am. Plus, it’s the basically best emulator on the market. Oh and I can play any switch game I care to play on it too.
Just quickly checking Amazon, a 3060 will run people a little less than $300. Now, if you want the newest hardware, yeah, it’s overpriced to hell and back and we’ve been complaining about it for about half a decade, but a 1060 6GB from 2016 still handles a vast number of games, it’s what my wife runs in her build to date. In addition, games tend to cost more digitally on console because there’s no competition of storefronts, whereas PC has key and bundle sites plus countless competing storefronts that want your money, or even Epic and GOG that regularly do “please use our service” game giveaways.
Either way though, nobody wants to pay an additional $400 just for the privilege of playing a handful of games. That cost is almost 6 full-priced games alone.
Also just due to sheer age, which makes it the platform with the most games period, dating back to 1995 in terms of games you can play on modern hardware without an emulator (I know it’s getting harder to run Windows 95/98 games now but it should still be possible with effort for a lot of games, unless Windows 11 got rid of something)
Sony will probably follow a 3-year lag release cycle, so yes, they won’t be exclusives eventually. However, emulation is highly unlikely given that almost 10-year old PS4 can still not be reliably emulated.
How is it scammy or gimmicky to put ads on a product you don’t pay for? I guess I’m just missing the disconnect here. This service costs Nvidia money to run.
It was straight-up free (as in: no tiers, just free) for a long time to early adopters of the Nvidia Shield. I can't remember when it was introduced but I think it was with the first iteration of Shield TV.
While I have no interest in using a service like this, I understand why they are doing this. I would imagine that a service like this probably costs a lot to run and it looks like they are adding them in a sensible way. It’s not like how a lot of mobile games are where the game just randomly stops in the middle of game-play to show you an ad.
FYI, this is not about free GPUs. “GeForce NOW” is a streaming service.
Headline would’ve been less confusing if it had the service name in quotes or something. I can see how people might read that and assume it means free, ad-supported GPUs. It does not.
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