Players who had been enjoying these games were then left with no option to stream them. The first signs of trouble came during the beta when all Capcom games were removed from the selection of games supported by Geforce Now. From what I’ve used, the technology works, and while you’re surrendering some image quality and responsiveness, it’s a compromise that plenty of players will be willing to make in exchange for the flexibility of being able to play these games on any device of your choosing.
The service has launched, and there is even a free tier available, so give it a try yourself if you want to get an idea of how it works and if your internet connection is up to the task.
It’s an intriguing concept, and by seeking to extend upon existing PC gaming services, rather than attempting to replace them, it’s been able to appeal to a particular kind of player – players that want to game on high-end PC hardware, even when they don’t have that hardware nearby.
You can then access the same game on Geforce Now when you’re on the go, with cloud saves synchronising between both versions in the background. A significant advantage for Geforce Now users is that with a single game purchase you can get access to the standard PC version for local play. In contrast, Stadia is an entirely new platform where you have to purchase Stadia specific versions of games. The critical difference between Geforce Now and Stadia, is that Nvidia is letting players bring their existing library of games over to Geforce Now. The promise is that you can play high-end games that would push a top-end gaming PC to the limit, even when you’re using a far less powerful local device, like a phone, tablet, or non-gaming PC/laptop. The pitch is similar to something like Google Stadia, where the games run remotely on Nvidia datacentres, and then the output is streamed to your local devices. It’s a cloud-based service whereby players can run games that they have on their Steam,, Origin, uPlay and Epic Game Store accounts. Geforce Now has been generating lots of attention since it came out of beta last month. Nvidia, who have been manufacturing the GPUs powering gaming rigs across the globe for decades, recently find themselves at the centre of a cloud streaming controversy that’s putting players, developers and publishers at odds with each other, but how did we get here?