Nvidia has made a change to its GeForce Now service a lot of users won’t like.
As reported by The Verge, the company has announced that they will be adding ads to the free tier of their service. Thankfully, these ads will not be added in in a way that will interrupt gameplay, but they will be intrusive in a different way.
Basically, the free GeForce Now experience requires players to wait on queue before a free computer is available to stream for them. Nvidia will now run ads while those players are waiting for their queue. So, it won’t affect the actual gameplay experience. But, free GeForce Now players will definitely feel that change in the overall experience of using the service.
GeForce Now was free for a very long time. In fact, before Nvidia settled down to a BYOG model permanently, they offered it as an extra product that you got with every purchase of their Nvidia Shield Android TV box. That Nvidia Shield offered an early taste to consumers of the SOC technology that would eventually make it to the Nintendo Switch, and yes, dear reader, that means the Switch could have had cloud streaming as far back when it launched.
The Verge report also points out the free GeForce Now is already deprecated in other ways. GeForce Now Ultimate users exclusively get to stream from computers that use RTX 4080 video cards, among other entitlements. This means free GeForce Now users don’t get the most powerful computers that Nvidia is offering. Consequently, that means that they don’t really get to experience what Nvidia’s cloud streaming technology is truly capable of.
Truthfully speaking, the cloud streaming market that Nvidia and Microsoft is still a somewhat small market, and presumably a few years off from being feasible enough for wide adoption. But with that in mind, Nvidia’s action could make advertising on game streaming services an eventual inevitability, and a regular feature on all such services.
Nvidia does offer GeForce Now in multiple countries and regions. Recently, the company raised prices for the service on some of those countries, citing increased operational costs. Among other things, this indicates the real growing pains game streaming still has before it presumably hits the mainstream, when everyone has internet fast enough to make such a service cheap, and therefore get everyone playing games even without game consoles.
The question the industry doesn’t want to answer, of course, is what if that just never happens, for the same reasons we now see VR failing to enter true mainstream usage? We don’t think the industry can keep it going as a hopeful business opportunity forever.
