Warner Bros. Interactive, Xbox Game Studios, and Klei are pulling their games from GeForce Now starting April 24. But while it’s nothing new for games to leave Nvidia’s cloud-streaming service, this time the company is ready for it.
In a blog post today, Nvidia is honest that more games will come and go through the next phase of its launch in June. And the company has put in place a number of initiatives to ensure more games support GeForce Now going forward. That includes making deals with companies like Ubisoft and integrating a GeForce Now opt-in into the publishing tools for Steam and more.
Nvidia released GeForce Now to everyone in February. This enables you to use a remote Nvidia computer to play games from your Steam or Epic Games Stores. You can sign up for free or upgrade to RTX hardware with ray tracing for $ 5 per month.
But with GeForce Now, you are always buying the games through existing stores. The only difference is whether you are playing on a local machine or a machine in an Nvidia server rack. That’s what caused confusion when publishers like Activision, 2K, and Rockstar pulled support from GeForce Now earlier this year.
That’s like if a book publisher put a ban on me sending Where The Wild Things Are through FedEx because FedEx wasn’t giving the publisher money. It doesn’t make sense.
But of course, the world doesn’t work that way. So instead, we all get to sit on the sidelines while corporations like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Take-Two determine how we can access our games. But, in the meantime, Nvidia is also figuring out how to encourage more developers to support GeForce Now.
Nvidia GeForce Now is ready to play by the rules
Most of the developers that backed out of GeForce Now did so because Nvidia started monetizing the service. And that switch seemingly caught some publishers by surprise. To address that issue going forward, Nvidia is going to play by the rules. This means letting studios opt into supporting GeForce Now. And to ensure that is something most developers consider, Nvidia is planning to make it frictionless.
“Behind the scenes, we’re working with digital game stores so publishers can tag their games for streaming on GeForce Now, right when they publish a game,” writes GeForce Now general manager Phil Eisler in a blog post. “This will help us bring more games to the library, quicker, as well as provide a more stable catalog.”
It should also encourage a wider variety of developers to join the program. But GeForce Now doesn’t work without big games. No gaming platform does. To that end, Nvidia has made a number of deals to bring recognizable games to its cloud-gaming service. These include Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Hearts of Iron IV, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, Rust, Warframe, and Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem.
But then Nvidia also is bringing in games from Bungie, Bandai Namco, and Ubisoft. This means blockbuster releases like Destiny 2, Dark Souls III, and Tekken 7.
And it’s possible this could snowball. Gamers could start using GeForce Now so frequently that they begin demanding support for it from new games. Or maybe we’ll have to use five bespoke cloud services to actually play all the games we want.
