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>> 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, wit

by sylens 4y ago

>> 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 started pulling their games off of it, in case they wanted to launch their own streaming service in the future. For this reason, I think Microsoft has the pole position with their XBox Cloud Gaming service. They have been running it as an extension of their Game Pass Ultimate service, and are rumored to allow you to play games you bought and own through the service sometime later this year. There's a future where a Microsoft game you own can be played on PC, XBox consoles, or streamed to an iPad or Chromebook, syncing progress between them.

keyle 4y ago
When I started using the xbox cloud gaming, I thought it was wishful thinking, a gimmick. Boy was I wrong. It's absolutely mind blowing. You do notice artefacts when you move fast in FPS type games but you even forget about it most of the time (fully wired internet) as it mostly occurs on the orbits of the screen, where you don't necessarily focus. For most games it's hard to notice unless you look for it.
- sylens 4y ago
  I first tried it with my iPhone and iPad last year and wasn’t impressed. They supposedly did some big update in the spring as well as lord of optimization work for Edge on the Steam Deck, where it feels great.
- causality0 4y ago
  Xbox cloud seems to have a lot of variance. I tried it on a phone with a 5G connection that was benchmarking at 70mb/s and the picture quality was absolutely awful, like a broken video clip on a twenty year old version of VLC media player.
aaomidi 4y ago
This is also why nvidia should just give a Linux machine mode as well. No licensing fees, let people play whatever they want.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm surprised that anybody implementing a service like this doesn't have Linux machines available at least as an option for some games. It will never work perfectly for all games, but it works for a high enough fraction that the licensing and resource overhead should make it worthwhile.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Paperspace offers such a service, though I've only ever used it with a Windows server and Linux client: https://blog.paperspace.com/setting-up-your-cloud-gaming-rig-with-paperspace-parsec/ https://blog.paperspace.com/setting-up-your-cloud-gaming-rig... I haven't checked recently, but the blog post claims it works with all games.
    - number6 4y ago
      I tried it and works very well
inerte 4y ago
+1 for Xbox Cloud. Easy to use and the games are already there. I am not a gamer anymore, I occasionally play here and there, perhaps couple hours once or twice a week. Sometimes nothing for days, then a Saturday playing 6 hours. One thing that Xbox Cloud did for me is to eliminate buyers remorse or thinking I have to try a game a little bit more because I paid money for it. If I don't like something, I just move to the next - in fact, sometimes I think that's actually _too_ easy and I wonder if I stick for a while the gameplay won't actually get better. Anyway, for $15 a month you have an Xbox ready in 10 seconds and dozens (hundreds?) of games at your fingertips... the value is ridiculously high. I can't see myself actually buying a console and paying $10-$60 for just one single game. edit: Think about it: you have $60 and a game you want to play is on Xbox Cloud. You can either buy the game (supposing you already have the console) or have access to ALL of cloud games for 4 months. It's a no-brainer! Also when I have bouts of extended hours at work or when I travelled to Brazil to stay there for a few weeks with my family, I just cancelled the membership and re-started it later. It's so convenient.
- fishtacos 4y ago
  I took advantage of one of those deals a year+ ago that amounted to a few bucks a month (3 or 4 I think) and when it comes time to renew, 15 USD is a steal for the value of games. Wholly agree, Game Pass is a game changer. With the studio partnerships and purchases (Bethesda, Activision etc. along with EA Play). It's probably going to have more expensive tiers down the line, but for now I'll gladly pay the tax.
jeffybefffy519 4y ago
It seems strange that some games dont support GeForce Now because in theory it takes a PC game and makes it more like a console, which is to say it makes it harder for people to cheat. This would be huge in certain titles whereby cheating is rampant and hard to control.
theptip 4y ago
If they can get this platform right it seems like this model solves one of the major complaints about Stadia, that you don't own the games. I made a quick search and GFN seemed to have all of the recent major new games and most of the old classics (4/5 old indie games I searched for); is it really that bad? Any game more than 5 years old runs fine on my existing rig, if this service lets me avoid buying a new GPU while still owning the games in my Steam library then it's pretty amazing in my book. I can see the other use-case is "play any game on a laptop" in which case the holes in the back-catalog could be more problematic, but I think they will go far just enabling people to play AAA and new indie games without a dedicated rig.
Aeolun 4y ago
I don’t really understand this though. I bought the games. What does a publisher have to say about where and or how I play them afterwards? If Nvidea wants to provide me with a cloud computer at a certain price then they should have any say in that.
- silisili 4y ago
  Agreed. I'm highly disappointed that Nvidia rolled over so easily, with zero resistance. They should have told the publishers to pound sand, as what they're doing is nothing like Stadia or Game Pass. They're just letting me play games I purchased from the comfort of my own couch, as far as I'm concerned.
  - sgift 4y ago
    Nvidia is highly dependent on the game publishers making sure their games work well with Nvidia cards. The whole "best played on Nvidia" thing would fall apart if publishers stopped working with them. Unfortunately, this leads to them being unable to be more of an opponent here. A third party would need to sue them or the government would have to introduce legislation to stop this bullshit. I'm not hopefully that either will happen in the near future, which is sad. Compared to e.g. Stadia Geforce Now has the far more customer friendly business model.
    - michaelmrose 4y ago
      Nvidia has like 85% of the market share for discrete cards. Releasing a game that doesn't work with Nvidia cards in the PC game space would mean flushing your entire release and all your publishers money. Nobody on earth is withholding support for Nvidia as a bargaining chip in the PC gaming space. The actual issue is vastly more trivial copyright makes it easy to forbid such and even if present license didn't forbid it then fighting in court would be as expensive as it is pointless because license v2 would certainly do the job. The only path forward is via willing cooperation.
      - sgift 4y ago
sofixa 4y ago
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.

by sylens 4y ago

keyle 4y ago

When I started using the xbox cloud gaming, I thought it was wishful thinking, a gimmick. Boy was I wrong. It's absolutely mind blowing. You do notice artefacts when you move fast in FPS type games but you even forget about it most of the time (fully wired internet) as it mostly occurs on the orbits of the screen, where you don't necessarily focus. For most games it's hard to notice unless you look for it.

sylens 4y ago
I first tried it with my iPhone and iPad last year and wasn’t impressed. They supposedly did some big update in the spring as well as lord of optimization work for Edge on the Steam Deck, where it feels great.
causality0 4y ago
Xbox cloud seems to have a lot of variance. I tried it on a phone with a 5G connection that was benchmarking at 70mb/s and the picture quality was absolutely awful, like a broken video clip on a twenty year old version of VLC media player.

aaomidi 4y ago

This is also why nvidia should just give a Linux machine mode as well. No licensing fees, let people play whatever they want.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Yeah, I'm surprised that anybody implementing a service like this doesn't have Linux machines available at least as an option for some games. It will never work perfectly for all games, but it works for a high enough fraction that the licensing and resource overhead should make it worthwhile.
- hedora 4y ago
  Paperspace offers such a service, though I've only ever used it with a Windows server and Linux client: https://blog.paperspace.com/setting-up-your-cloud-gaming-rig-with-paperspace-parsec/ https://blog.paperspace.com/setting-up-your-cloud-gaming-rig... I haven't checked recently, but the blog post claims it works with all games.
  - number6 4y ago
    I tried it and works very well

inerte 4y ago

+1 for Xbox Cloud. Easy to use and the games are already there. I am not a gamer anymore, I occasionally play here and there, perhaps couple hours once or twice a week. Sometimes nothing for days, then a Saturday playing 6 hours. One thing that Xbox Cloud did for me is to eliminate buyers remorse or thinking I have to try a game a little bit more because I paid money for it. If I don't like something, I just move to the next - in fact, sometimes I think that's actually _too_ easy and I wonder if I stick for a while the gameplay won't actually get better. Anyway, for $15 a month you have an Xbox ready in 10 seconds and dozens (hundreds?) of games at your fingertips... the value is ridiculously high. I can't see myself actually buying a console and paying $10-$60 for just one single game. edit: Think about it: you have $60 and a game you want to play is on Xbox Cloud. You can either buy the game (supposing you already have the console) or have access to ALL of cloud games for 4 months. It's a no-brainer! Also when I have bouts of extended hours at work or when I travelled to Brazil to stay there for a few weeks with my family, I just cancelled the membership and re-started it later. It's so convenient.

fishtacos 4y ago
I took advantage of one of those deals a year+ ago that amounted to a few bucks a month (3 or 4 I think) and when it comes time to renew, 15 USD is a steal for the value of games. Wholly agree, Game Pass is a game changer. With the studio partnerships and purchases (Bethesda, Activision etc. along with EA Play). It's probably going to have more expensive tiers down the line, but for now I'll gladly pay the tax.

jeffybefffy519 4y ago

It seems strange that some games dont support GeForce Now because in theory it takes a PC game and makes it more like a console, which is to say it makes it harder for people to cheat. This would be huge in certain titles whereby cheating is rampant and hard to control.

theptip 4y ago

If they can get this platform right it seems like this model solves one of the major complaints about Stadia, that you don't own the games. I made a quick search and GFN seemed to have all of the recent major new games and most of the old classics (4/5 old indie games I searched for); is it really that bad? Any game more than 5 years old runs fine on my existing rig, if this service lets me avoid buying a new GPU while still owning the games in my Steam library then it's pretty amazing in my book. I can see the other use-case is "play any game on a laptop" in which case the holes in the back-catalog could be more problematic, but I think they will go far just enabling people to play AAA and new indie games without a dedicated rig.

Aeolun 4y ago

I don’t really understand this though. I bought the games. What does a publisher have to say about where and or how I play them afterwards? If Nvidea wants to provide me with a cloud computer at a certain price then they should have any say in that.

silisili 4y ago
Agreed. I'm highly disappointed that Nvidia rolled over so easily, with zero resistance. They should have told the publishers to pound sand, as what they're doing is nothing like Stadia or Game Pass. They're just letting me play games I purchased from the comfort of my own couch, as far as I'm concerned.
- sgift 4y ago
  Nvidia is highly dependent on the game publishers making sure their games work well with Nvidia cards. The whole "best played on Nvidia" thing would fall apart if publishers stopped working with them. Unfortunately, this leads to them being unable to be more of an opponent here. A third party would need to sue them or the government would have to introduce legislation to stop this bullshit. I'm not hopefully that either will happen in the near future, which is sad. Compared to e.g. Stadia Geforce Now has the far more customer friendly business model.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    Nvidia has like 85% of the market share for discrete cards. Releasing a game that doesn't work with Nvidia cards in the PC game space would mean flushing your entire release and all your publishers money. Nobody on earth is withholding support for Nvidia as a bargaining chip in the PC gaming space. The actual issue is vastly more trivial copyright makes it easy to forbid such and even if present license didn't forbid it then fighting in court would be as expensive as it is pointless because license v2 would certainly do the job. The only path forward is via willing cooperation.
    - sgift 4y ago

sofixa 4y ago

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.