Game Streaming Services - Stadia, Geforce Now, xCloud, PS Now

Crone

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More competition out of beta: Geforce Now.


Today, the company’s finally ready to let North America and Europe sign up to pay for its GeForce Now service, starting at $5 a month, while also offering unlimited one-hour free trials that don’t even require a credit card.​
...​
Unlike Google, Sony, and Microsoft’s offerings, Nvidia has a very different pitch. It’s your existing library of PC games that you can now play anywhere, instead of having to buy new games and / or subscribe to a Netflix-like catalog. Nvidia supports Steam, the Epic Games Store, Battle.net, and Uplay, and it runs instances of each for you in the cloud. You can log into your accounts, download many of your existing purchases near-instantly to your cloud desktop, sync your old save games, and pick up where you left off in a couple of minutes at most — no patches necessary.​
Oh dang! Now I kind of want a nVidia Shield, but have no reason for one.
 

Armadon

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I've been using GeForce now for a while and it's actually pretty good. I use it to play overwatch at work on my shitty computer. I'll never use it to play hardcore but if you just want to relax and play some graphic demanding games on a crap computer it gets the job done.
 

Ukerric

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Unlike Google, Sony, and Microsoft’s offerings, Nvidia has a very different pitch. It’s your existing library of PC games that you can now play anywhere, instead of having to buy new games and / or subscribe to a Netflix-like catalog. Nvidia supports Steam, the Epic Games Store, Battle.net, and Uplay, and it runs instances of each for you in the cloud. You can log into your accounts, download many of your existing purchases near-instantly to your cloud desktop, sync your old save games, and pick up where you left off in a couple of minutes at most — no patches necessary.
Note highlighted word.

There's two steps to be done there:

Step 1: Find the game on Nvidia's catalog for the service
Step 2: Launch the game which will require you to login into your store account

The trick is that Nvidia has pre-installed copies for those games from the stores ready to launch. However, if Nvidia hasn't installed its copy, then you can't play it.

This is still better than Stadia's "the devs have to make a specific Stadia version for us to stream", but don't expect to find every single game from Steam there. Notably your dating sims :)
 

a_skeleton_05

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Is it though?

Activision jokes aside, losing access to games through these services is a major concern for people, and things like this will turn some people off. This is a different situation where the product isn't bought in the service, but if people buy games from the publisher specifically to use through Geforce Now (such a stupid fucking name) only to then have the ability to play it taken away... it's a shit situation.
 

Valderen

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It's not just Activision-Blizzard though, Capcom, EA, Konami, Remedy, Rockstar and Square-Enix have also pulled out after beta ended.

Looks like there won't be a lot left to use on Nvidia Now.

According to the article, no explanation on why, but it's speculating that they might want to get some money from the services with so much competition, or they might be planing their own cloud services.

Interesting story to follow for sure.
 

meStevo

I think your wife's a bigfoot gus.
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xCloud testing comes to iOS


Because of restrictions w/ Apples app testing program it's really limited, may have to cycle through people and only has 1 game (Halo: MCC) right now.
 
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meStevo

I think your wife's a bigfoot gus.
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- Journey to the Savage Planet
- A Plague Tale
- Cities Skylines
- Age of Wonders Planetfall
- Mudrunner

Steamworld games coming to Stadia - Google’s Stadia adds four SteamWorld games to its lineup
- SteamWorld Dig 2 and SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech will be available for Pro subscribers (aka people who forgot to unsubscribe) to claim for free
 
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Namon

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I really like the Nvidia model most of all. You still own the games. In fact you own them outside of the service itself. All Nvidia provides is the computational power for you to play when you are on a less than optimal set up. It really is the best of both worlds and I may look into it down the road. My friend has it and he's been showing me footage and it's really quite good on pretty much everything but a smart phone. Even his potato laptop runs shit really nicely. You do need a pretty beefy internet connection though.
 
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a_skeleton_05

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Give it a couple years and they'll all want their own streaming service like how video steaming is going
 
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Crone

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Give it a couple years and they'll all want their own streaming service like how video steaming is going
Yep, Activision/Blizzard pulled all their shit, but what for? It wasn't the Youtube deal was it? Why the fuck do they care so much? But my guess is they all think they will all have their own streaming service soon. Dumb.
 

Raes

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I really want to own a big game studio some day so I can just decide to dick over the company that makes half my customer's video cards...
 
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Ukerric

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Give it a couple years and they'll all want their own streaming service like how video steaming is going
A couple years? They already want it. I'm pretty sure both Activision, Ubi and EA are already building their own streaming service. All of whom will cost you 9.99, meaning nobody will subscribe.
 
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jooka

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Nvidia’s GeForce Now took yet another hit this weekend with a new publisher pulling its software from the cloud gaming service. That’s because GeForce Now, unlike competing services like Google Stadia, lets anyone who purchases a digital game on Valve’s Steam marketplace reinstall it on a virtual machine and play it using its cloud platform.

That doesn’t sit well with some game publishers and developers, including Raphael van Lierop, the game director and writer of indie hit The Long Dark from his company Hinterland Studio. Lierop pulled his game over the weekend, displeased that it was included in the paid version of GeForce Now without his explicit permission.


Imagine more games will be ditching GeForce Now.
 

Blitz

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God forbid people have different routes to play their games... :rolleyes:. These developers are too fucking greedy. Now we'll get 20 different underwhelming side attempts at doing the same thing GeForce Now does with way worse quality.
 
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