I used it in the beginning for this early adopter price to be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 on my 15 year old PC. It was great but I canceled because of hardware upgrades since then. Apparently, just in time before the inevitable enshittification.
What is this service, exactly? Do they host games on powerful PCs for you to play remotely or something?
Kinda. It’s basically a love child between server hosting and streaming services with focus on gaming.
You can connect your Steam account, for example, and then run games on their hardware which is streamed to you by browser. So you have control which games to run into but have to bring your own.
Payment options include more powerful hardware but even the basic one was great when I used it. So I could play a modern game with raytracing on my old potato. Your machine just needs to be able to easily stream stuff, so run a modern browser without sweating.
On the offside, it’s naturally always online and I had latency problems when many players were online which was common on weekends and what got me to upgrade my setup eventually.
While this may look like a good reason not to use the service, I learned of an even better reason just now from this article:
At the start of next year, GeForce Now will roll out a 100-hour monthly playtime allowance to continue providing exceptional quality and speed – as well as shorter queue times – for Performance and Ultimate members
Apparently you have to wait in line?!
Honestly, can’t remember the last time I queued. That said, maybe it’s a regional problem.
You also have to re-log in to Steam every fucking time.
This is the craziest part. They really make you feel uncomfortable and not really part of the system. You are just a subscription and nothing more, you get nothing, you own nothing, and you might as well give up and keep paying for a service you might be able to use
I was on the founder plan for a while because 50/year to keep an eye on the state of the tech wasn’t a huge deal, and there was plenty of stuff my MacBook wasn’t really powerful enough for but could tolerate the lag.
But the whole log-in process was way too much of a barrier for me to actually use it routinely.
That’s not true, it was an issue for a bit, but hasn’t been for a very long time.
Source: Just cancelled my ultimate plan that I’ve had for a few years. I mostly used it to play windows only steam games on my Mac
It was less than 6 months ago when I finally cancelled.
Not just every gaming session. Literally every single time I switched games. Not one single exception.
That’s really weird because it worked perfectly fine for me and many others. I’ve literally played every day the last few weeks with satisfactory and randomly over the past few years with other Steam games with very few sign in issues.
To be fair, Xbox game pass cloud gaming, there are “peak times” where you may have to wait for an instance to open up. It really only happened for me on MS flight sim. But still notable
Yeah, they only have a finite number of servers that they can run VMs on, and are pretty consistently at max capacity. That said, there’s also limits on individual stream times, so after a certain amount of time you have to reconnect to continue playing (which, if you’re playing in a busy time, means re-queueing). So this at least keeps the line moving, in a way.
I haven’t tried it in a year or so, but when I played it last, I didn’t have very long lines; a minute at most, even at peak hours, on a free (deprioritized) account. Not the end of the world, but definitely an inconvenience.
Makes sense. They need to save some GPUs for the poor crypto farmers and AI speculators.
