NVIDIA announced today that its cloud gaming service GeForce NOW is officially out of beta, after over two years. The GPU manufacturer revealed some figures of the beta testing phase: over 300K beta testers streamed more than 70 million hours of gameplay in 30 countries across North America and Europe.
As per the recent rumors, GeForce NOW will have a free tier that allows 'standard access' to the servers and up to one-hour sessions, though there is no limit on how many sessions you can request. The premium 'Founders' tier, on the other hand, provides 'priority access' to the GeForce NOW servers, extended session length for up to six hours of uninterrupted gameplay, and access to RTX 2080-level of hardware power which means enabling raytracing in the supported games.
The first three months of 'Founders' access will be provided for free, while the normal price for the rest of 2020 is going to be set to $4.99 per month. This is a special offer, though, which suggests the subscription fee may well increase in 2021.
In terms of platform support, GeForce NOW is playable on PCs, Macs, NVIDIA's own SHIELD devices and Android phones, with Chromebooks due to be supported later this year. In terms of game support, NVIDIA is touting over 30 free-to-play games, 'hundreds' of games from about 50 publishers that can be instantly launched, and over a thousand games that can be played through what they're calling 'single session installs'.
According to NVIDIA, the library of games will continue to be updated based on input from the players and the publishers. In short, if you want a game, you should ask for it.
From what we can see, though, there are quite a few big games missing. Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 come to mind, with the latter available on Google Stadia. On the other hand, NVIDIA is pushing the ability to import your own library of games as a major advantage over Stadia, even though it doesn't apply across every PC storefront as EA's Origin, for instance, isn't supported at all right now.
What do you think about GeForce NOW's offering? Participate in the poll below and leave your comment, too.
- I don't do cloud gaming 54%, 258 votes258 votes 54%258 votes - 54% of all votes
- I'll try the Founders tier 25%, 117 votes117 votes 25%117 votes - 25% of all votes
- I'll stick to the Free tier 18%, 86 votes86 votes 18%86 votes - 18% of all votes
- I prefer Google Stadia 3%, 14 votes14 votes 3%14 votes - 3% of all votes
