Greedy Game Publishers Pull Their Games From nVidia GeForce Now Cloud Gaming Service

Cloud gaming is a type of online gaming that runs games on remote servers and streams them directly to a user’s device, whether that’s a computer, console, or mobile device and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon.

You’ve got companies like Google with their Stadia platform, who are treating cloud gaming as the only way to play games, where you pay them full-price to stream a game on their service. Then you’ve got Microsoft’s xCloud service, who are treating cloud gaming as a companion to traditional local hardware gaming. You’ve got Sony with their PlayStation Now service and even Amazon are privately working on their own game streaming service.

Nvidia’s GeForce Now, is the first pro-consumer cloud gaming service that really makes sense and could entice even the most cynical gamer to try it out.

Your Games. Your Devices. Play Anywhere – You bought it, you own it
Connect to your favourite stores and stream your library of games. You make your purchase on your personal store account, your games will always stay with you.

You see, Google’s Stadia platform will force you to re-purchase each game individually at full price in an isolated ecosystem that doesn’t allow you to play games locally. With GeForce Now, you don’t have to re-purchase your games on their platform, you essentially pay a nominal fee of $4.99 a month to stream the games you already own on one of Nvidia’s high-powered gaming rigs. You can even sync your save games from your PC and pick up where you left off.

Change nothing, get everything
GeForce NOW instantly transforms nearly any laptop, desktop, Mac, SHIELD TV or Android mobile device into the PC gaming rig you’ve always dreamed of.  Instantly play the most demanding PC games and seamlessly play across your devices.

However, a spanner has been thrown in the works as major publishers Activision Blizzard and Bethesda have pulled all of their games from the platform just one week after it launched. You can’t find games from EA, Square Enix, or Rockstar on GeForce Now either. With no explanation as to why they have pulled their games from the platform, this has understandably led gamers to believe that their decision is entirely financially motivated.

The continued publisher resistance towards GeForce Now shows complete anti-consumerism on the part of the companies involved. Nvidia’s service doesn’t sell you games directly. Instead, it basically rents you a gaming PC in the cloud, and allows you sign into your accounts on gaming platforms like Steam, the Epic Game Store, and Battle.net to play games you already own.

This is utter short-sightedness from major game publishers who don’t understand that GeForce Now simply offers gamers more ways to play their games. Big publishers pulling their games from GeForce Now not only costs those publishers potential sales from would-be buyers, it also threatens Nvidia’s ability to retain early subscribers.

As usual, the good guys at Valve and CD Projekt continue to support this pro-consumer platform by including their game libraries, offering titles such as the Half-Life and Witcher series, with day-one support promised for Cyberpunk 2077, perhaps the most hotly anticipated game of the year. Nvidia’s service also supports many of the most popular free-to-play games, including Fortnite, Dota 2, League of Legends, Destiny 2, Counter-Strike: GO, World of Tanks, Warframe, Team Fortress 2, and Path of Exile.