Nvidia, the company that makes graphics cards you can’t afford anymore and keeps vying for status as the world’s most valuable company, is taking a page from Xbox’s book and announcing a confusing change to its GeForce Now cloud gaming service that includes a monthly cap on the hours you can play games. As many people are saying in the comments to the announcement, maybe it’s time to build a PC.
I will be honest that after writing the lede above I had to look up exactly what GeForce Now is, and reaffirm that it is not one of the many Nvidia things my graphics card installed on my computer. Like Stadia (RIP) and Microsoft’s xCloud, GeForce Now can let you stream games your hardware might not be able to support. It has a bunch of tiers, some of which now have new names and new limits.
The whole reason they want to move us from ownership to streaming is because it keeps the control on their side and they’ll converge on enshittification every time.
Their official reason why they cap it, also doesn’t make sense to me. If a low number of gamer use more than 100 hours, they could easily afford this by the high amount of people not gaming that much. It looks like the first step to pay per hour now, to maximize profit.
I guess the service is dying, the move seems like business oriented, next step would be to reduce catalog and finally cancellation.
I suspect (without any evidence) that these services were designed to be low commitment practice run for graphics cards as an enterprise service. Let them build up tools, expertise and infrastructure before signing any long term contracts
Very true, the prices of the Nvidia cards are becoming inaccessible, I’m glad that the SteamDeck triggered an interest of mobile PC gaming because many games are now considering and ensuring playability in low end HW.
