I would urge people to try out Shadow. It’s a cloud based windows gaming machine that you remote connect to. It’s great. You can install anything you want.
GeForce Now: A Review
161–170 of 198 posts
Re: GeForce Now: A Review
#162You guys are walking into a trap. This is going to be way worse than movie streaming, and unlike movies, when one of these companies pulls a game you once loved and it's not available, there will be no pirates to save you, because the software is trapped in the cloud. The future may well be streaming-only. Mods will be greatly impacted eventually, with only sanctioned mods allowed to run in the cloud. There'll be no…
Attachment to games will change. If you go in with the knowledge that the experience is epheremal (as all experiences are by their very nature!), it will be easier to let one go (not pay the rent anymore) and go into the next. Network effect of course will be horrible, if everyone plays something, surely many will pay the rent just to not feel the fear of missing out. The second point, indie games will absolutely exi…
I don't want literature, film, or music to be "ephemeral", and I don't want to be unable to show these things to my friends and family.
I don't want games to be ephemeral either. They are a form of art as valid as any of those others. Often, games combine all those forms into one magnificent modern whole.
I want to be able to examine and study games as a form of art, the same way film & lit students study those things; I can't do that if they get pulled from the streaming service to get a tax cut, ala HBO. The only option is offline.
Re: GeForce Now: A Review
#163I have always enjoyed strategy games the most and a few years back I briefly used a service like GeforceNow. Since input lag is not super important for those games, I enjoyed using it and didn't have a lot of problems. If I would start some casual gaming now, I would probably use such a service since I would definitely not get an extra computer and like the simplicity and availability (I just need a laptop and a stable internet connection). I use an old macbook with a crappy inbuilt graphic card, I can't play anything.
Re: GeForce Now: A Review
#164>> While GeForce Now supports a large number of my games on Steam, it doesn’t support them all. It gives me access to 88 out of my over 400 purchased games, with the emphasis being on more recent and/or more popular games. This is going to be what ends up hamstringing the service in the long run. When GeForce Now first came out, you could play a much larger catalog of titles; publishers then caught wind of this and s…
Xbox Cloud gaming has the worst UX out of GeForce Now, Stadia and itself, unless you use it from an Xbox (when it's only utility is that you don't have to download to play). Start-up times are rather long, at least here in France, and games require a controller (even games that would be a million times better to play with a mouse, like Football Manager or Cities:Skylines). There's no way to explore the games available from an Xbox, you have to find a game and select cloud instead of download/play.
It does have the massive advantages of name recognition, lots of games and more importantly, first party exclusives and subsidised prices, so it will probably be the main cloud gaming platform in the future.
Re: GeForce Now: A Review
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and I bought a license that allows me to play them on any machine that has Steam installed. Whether it’s a machine I bought, or one that I rent from AWS or Google. Why is renting a PC from Nvidea any different?
I find it unlikely that the license agreement and AUP of steam, and in addition of the game you purchased, which might have its own stipulations, is that simple and open. Feel free to supply evidence to the contrary though. I would be happy to be wrong.
> in addition of the game you purchased, which might have its own stipulations
Since I don’t see any additional agreements when I buy/play the game on steam it seems unlikely there is one.
It seems the steam license agreement only allows you to make non-commercial use of paid games. I can imagine that Nvidia just didn’t want to go into the battle of whether pre-installing steam content that (other) users have already paid for constitutes a violation of that provision.
Re: GeForce Now: A Review
#166GeForce Now was/is great. Bethesda though (amongst others) have lost a formerly loyal fan due to pulling their games. Why? I own the games, I paid for them. If I had my old PC still I could play them just the same. Presumably so that in several years they can run their own cloud service. The greed of companies will be their own downfall.
All (or at least most, though I didn't notice any missing that aren't super old - it has Morrowind on there) of the Bethesda games are available on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. It's more expensive but comes with the games so might be worth a look if you particularly like Bethesda's products.
Re: GeForce Now: A Review
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Attachment to games will change. If you go in with the knowledge that the experience is epheremal (as all experiences are by their very nature!), it will be easier to let one go (not pay the rent anymore) and go into the next. Network effect of course will be horrible, if everyone plays something, surely many will pay the rent just to not feel the fear of missing out. The second point, indie games will absolutely exi…
I don't want literature, film, or music to be "ephemeral", and I don't want to be unable to show these things to my friends and family. I don't want games to be ephemeral either. They are a form of art as valid as any of those others. Often, games combine all those forms into one magnificent modern whole. I want to be able to examine and study games as a form of art, the same way film & lit students study those thing…
I think we can discuss two things here, what will happen and what should happen.
For the "should" part, I think it'd be great if software would somehow expire, and then become free software, as in, code and assets too. I'm not a lawyer or anything but as artwork goes public domain after a while, so should software and its assets. It would be great "for the people" so that the experience wouldn't go away as abandonware and I'm sure projects would spring up that would make them playable again on current architecture - similar to how GOG started out originally.
For the "will happen" part, streaming services will go the Netflix way, work great for a short while (we're at this part I think), then the games would be pulled from third party services only to be played exlusively at specific services, while the first streaming only gaming sensation would spring up... so rent seeking basically, for gaming.
Re: GeForce Now: A Review
#168GeForce Now is great for simulation games like Factorio or Civilization. Unfortunately 2K Games decided to arbitrarily restrict users of GeForce Now from playing Civilization VI, even with a licensed copy from the Steam store. In the beginning, it worked great. I could play on a giant map with 13 AI civilizations who completed their turns in a few seconds. And my laptop didn’t sound like an airplane. I’m still bitter…
I agree 100%. However note your save games should be safe on steam cloud. Nothing gets stored on geforce now - your virtual instance gets destroyed once you log off. Should be easy to verify via your laptop even if you don't load up the save.
You can also check the status of your cloud saves directly in your Steam profile through a browser: https://store.steampowered.com/account/remotestorage. You can even download the files too.
Re: GeForce Now: A Review
#169One way I’ve benefited from this is by using Epic’s free games deals. They’re a bit iffy over the summer, but during the holiday season they gave away a bunch of games like the Metro series, the Tomb Raider series etc. I have a founders subscription which makes it good value but even without, by maximising the free games potential and Steam sales etc, I have a great gaming library I can spin up in a minute or two without needing a gaming PC. Not had noticeable latency issues. YMMV as always, but if I ever decide to build a gaming PC, I have those games in my Steam or Epic library and can run them locally (and most games will sync saves etc. so no progress lost).
One game that really pissed me off was Elite: Frontiers because they decided they were no longer going to support macOS, but I was able to continue playing just by using GFN. So the argument of “once you’ve bought it once, you can play it forever” doesn’t really hold true for games you download and run locally in all cases either.
Re: GeForce Now: A Review
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is literally already the case with GeForce Now - you're NOT allowed to play your whole library because the publishers sued nVidia for allowing you to play the GAME YOU OWN on the machines YOU PAY FOR in their cloud.
>GAME YOU OWN You can't own games. You can only get a license to play one.
I have no idea why you are being downvoted. As much as I wish otherwise, what you say is entirely correct.
In some limited sense it is kind possible to own some games, the ones that exist on physical media and play on devices that do not require online connectivity. But even in the case of GOG, which sells DRM free games you can download, you aren't really the "owner" of anything tangible - you have a license to use the software. The fact that you may have a copy of the files is not the same as owning anything.