GeForce Now: A Review

The library plan sounds fantastic.

I don't think you're wrong with regards to past consumer rejection. I think people were now primed with the spread of internet and the SAAS / cloud culture that followed in the 2000s, then in the meantime smartphones happened, lootboxes / gacha became normal on phones then later in the wider gaming culture, music streaming gained steam and Netflix finally made a successful media streaming service... normalizing consumer behaviors which were previously alien to many consumers. But now the market is ripe for cloud gaming to become popular. Sometime in the 2010s maybe game passes on console also become a thing - the type of payment when as long as you hold the subscription, you have access to the downloaded game. I think that considering these changes in gaming and consumer behavior explain why cloud gaming is now acceptable enough to be profitable, or to be a thing at least.

Regarding Arma II and DayZ, and so on, I don't particularly like this type of thought experiment. I think if we allow the liberty, the opposite conclusion can also be drawn: think how much productive these people could have been if they haven't wasted their energy in these mods. Or what else could they have made - contributing to free software instead, or any other social good. And the ideas are also not original, I mean in general; the light bulb, the radio and the telephone all got invented independently in different parts of the world, so, Arma II being a cloud only game, we wouldn't have DayZ and so on, but we'd have something other that made battle royale a popular gaming phenomenon.

I think you're onto something with modders. I think local / non-cloud gaming will be alive as long as there are devices that run third party software without much issue. The games might not be very advanced or flashy, the AAA titles will surely go extract as much rent as possible, but I'm sure that the next Minecraft, Stardew Valley, or Teeworlds will get made, as these all began (or still are) passion projects of a single person, and sometimes, people just want to give. So I think passion projects will keep the local game alive - be it modding, an indie game or free software.

Heh, yeah, the name, much like most of the game, is place holder stuff at this point. I hope Nintendo won't sue me until I publish, if I ever even get that far!

I had to Ctrl/⌘ + F because I couldn't find anyone mentioning Shadow. Why is GeForce Now still more popular than Shadow, especially when Nvidia limits the games you are allowed to play.

I haven't plugged my local gaming PC into the wall in months. The future of Mac gaming for me is Shadow.

The chart says there is a total latency on PC of 80ms. It's unplayable. 80ms is actual garbage. Comparing it to console works because consoles typically are garbage these days. FPS/TPS on console sucks. Yes, Geforce Now may be comparable to a console, because you're just running the PC version of the game remotely, and the PC version of games typically probably have less lag due to consoles sucking. Of course, Geforce Now is still back to the 80ms a console might get, that's still terrible.

> Like think about it, if you're comparing 16.6ms to 100+ then the game would be running at like 1fps and is completely useless.

Not how it works, you could have 2000ms of lag and still have a completely smooth game running at 500fps. But why are we talking about smoothness all of a sudden?

That youtube review is clickbait and bikesheds on some stupid detail like tree rendering distance on some certain scene. I don't think it even talked about input lag. He did state that cloud gaming being bad is a misconception because he feels like it's good, though. Also Genshin Impact is a laggy game. I have played it on a PC, and it's framelocked way down to 60FPS, and so it only uses a small fraction of CPU/GPU, and it's still so laggy you can't even aim right with the mouse with an aiming weapon like the longbow. Just moving around is tedious, which indeeds gives me that post 2000s console feel. The game with vsync off plays far worse than a misconfigured system. Even any FPS like UT or Quake with vsync on feel more responsive than Genshin Impact.