GeForce Now is still pretty good: there are a lot of good games on there and they perform well, but the service's overall utility is a fraction of what it was when Steam library were fully integrated. Theoretically another service, Shadow, is arriving in most regions of the United States this year and promises to do a lot of what GeForce Now did in its early days but, first, Shadow isn't available in a lot of regions right now (including mine) and, second, I'm not sanguine that some form of this same problem will not occur the moment Shadow enjoys a bit of popularity and attention. A solution existed to let people painlessly and near-flawlessly play single-player PC games if they're on the road or just don't have access to the latest and greatest gear, and while ISP's are certainly working hard to ruin this idea from their side of the equation, it's hard to see the harm in letting more people play more games. But those don't exist right now and frankly, a publisher exclusive streaming platform will never be that interesting a proposition because the convenience is the point. When Patrick covered this last year, he correctly identified the rent-seeking behavior at play here and the fact that many publishers have designs on offering their own streaming platforms. But just letting people access the game libraries full of things they’ve already bought is a different matter. After all, GeForce Now is taking money for subscriptions. Now, there were games that GeForce Now offered directly for streaming, and in those cases it’s absolutely fair and even crucial that developer and publishers be compensated for that. Arguably, it allowed more people to become customers because it sidestepped the $500-1000 buy-in to play modern PC games. It was letting people use a remote session to access their Steam library. I understood how weird it was that GeForce was featuring their games as being playable on the service without ever reaching out to them, but at a very basic level, GeForce Now wasn't earning subscription money by giving anyone's games away for free. I had hoped, when publishers and developers were initially expressing some misgivings about GeForce Now, that eventually they'd get used to the idea. The difference is that instead of having access to all 1,000 of my games, and the 300 or so good ones that I own (in the colloquial sense, not the true sense that every EULA tells you no longer exists), I now have access to about 150 of them. Playing an RTS I own on Steam yesterday, I had to sign in to my Steam account on the remote machine like I did a year ago. As you might imagine, that’s reduced the size of the library considerably. Mind you, that's still what's happening, but only with games from developers and publishers who specifically opted-in to the service. That option I had last winter to launch my Steam account on a remote machine? Gone. The problem is that GeForce Now is a shadow of what it was, and it seems like that primarily because the people who made all those games I have purchased over the years kicked up a fuss at the idea of people who bought them being able to play them on GeForce Now. I'm not sure it ever passes the "you can't even tell" test, but the stream becomes completely unobtrusive to the point that I at least forget that I'm playing on a server and not on my own PC. Even on an internet connection where my partner is in all-day video meetings and the contents of my hard drives are slowly uploading to the cloud, I can play just about anything I want at a shockingly high level of quality. This was GeForce Now's moment, and in fairness to Nvidia, the platform has risen to the occasion.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |