Starting on March 5, GeForce Now users enjoying the service for free will find themselves faced with ads while they're waiting for their turn to play.
    • WolfLink
      251·
      9 months ago

      It’s always had a free tier. The free tier existed before the paid tier did.

      • Albert@lemmy.sysctl.ioEnglish
        12·
        9 months ago

        And tbh it’s always been pretty decent. You can access (almost) your entire Steam library.

        • circuitfarmer@lemmy.world
          13·
          9 months ago

          What advantage is there to using GeForce Now instead of Steam itself?

          That’s not bait btw; I’m an all-AMD Linux gamer and I’ve literally never used GeForce Now.

          • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
            15·
            9 months ago

            Remember Stadia? GeForce Now is what it should’ve been. It’s a cloud gaming platform, but you bring your own games.

            • circuitfarmer@lemmy.world
              11·
              9 months ago

              Ah interesting. So rendering isn’t done locally?

              In that case I wouldn’t even expect it to have a free tier since there are significant costs.

              • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
                8·
                9 months ago

                The game is rendered remotely and broadcast to one or multiple clients that display the output and handle the input. The network introduces a massive round-trip (input -> network -> remote -> network -> display) latency compared to running the game locally, so it’s only really viable for most games where the internet infrastructure allows it (so Australia and much of Europe are out). The advantage is that the remote VM can be significantly more powerful than a local machine.

                The early service was both an experiment/development version and a loss leader to get people to join the service in the first place. Price hikes and free service degradation were planned and inevitable.

                • pixelscriptEnglish
                  3·
                  9 months ago

                  It amazes me how every time a for-profit company that provided a free service goes mask-off and starts aggressively monetizing it so many people put on a shocked Pikachu face.

                  This is exactly how this works, people! The free shit is always bait to draw you in and get you invested. The trap was designed from the start to snap shut once there was enough of you in it. They fully intend to not just extract value from you to run the service, but also to retroactively pay for all the free shit they gave you. It was always a loan. An investment.

                  Oh, sure, you can always be sly by taking the free shit and ditching once monetization comes over the horizon. But do so knowing that every time you need to do this is the rule, not the exception. Companies aren’t suddenly slighting you one by one out of the blue, it was always the strategy from the beginning for all of them.

                • circuitfarmer@lemmy.world
                  2·
                  9 months ago

                  Makes sense. Yeah, I can see advantages for people e.g. on a laptop but with a good enough network infrastructure to make it work.

                  Thanks for the details!

              • XTornado
                2·
                9 months ago

                Yeah… The only good thing of offering free tier is to fill gaps of unused machines during low usage hours, as they otherwise have the machines unused. Of course it only makes sense if that makes you money, like people testing it that eventually subscribe, having ads on it or similar.

          • WolfLink
            8·
            9 months ago

            If you can’t run the game you want to play locally, you might be able to run it on GFN and stream it instead.

            If you have a reasonably powerful computer and the games you play work on Linux, you are much better off just running the games locally.

            • circuitfarmer@lemmy.world
              3·
              9 months ago

              Most definitely. I don’t think personally I would have an interest in using GFN, but I just didn’t understand what it was at all.

        • yamanii@lemmy.world
          4·
          9 months ago

          60 minutes of play is not pretty decent at all, the free tier is just to test if it works since there’s a queue time too.

          • XTornado
            4·
            9 months ago

            Well… Let me tell you some people doesn’t have that much time to game at once…specially the ones that didn’t get a gaming computer or console which this would benefit.

            On the other hand I guess the free tier has queues so not sure if it would help for those.

            • yamanii@lemmy.world
              1·
              9 months ago

              I know, I tried it, and had to wait half an hour for a spot right after lunch time, the queue for the prime time gaming hours of 18 to 22 must be even longer.

        • WolfLink
          3·
          9 months ago

          It used to be good enough that I would rely on it over dual-booting my laptop. But at least to me it’s only a last resort now.

          They’ve limited which games you can play, added tighter time restrictions, added a long wait to even start playing, and now ads.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
    226·
    9 months ago

    I mean, it is a free product. This doesn’t bother me too much. Eventually they have to make money to stay in business as much as I despise Nvidia.

    It would be a completely different story if I was paying for it.