So I got the email today and I just want to share my experience.
Im with NVIDIA on this one, let me explain. I’ve been using the service for the past 2 years (half of it’s lifetime since release 4 years ago) and I thought to myself from the get go “this is unsubtainable” and that I would have nowhere to game on high performance after they inevitably shut down the free plan. I was wrong, and this does translate to a good experience
To elaborate, queues in free tier have 3 states, the first one being “go grab a snack and you’ll be back to the game launcher” which is when the queue has a little over 100 people that took up to 10 minutes to clear, this has been the most common in my experience due to my region’s timezone being the most far apart from the people in my continent (America) and thus I get to play when most people arent and such the queue is very accessible
The second state is “everyone is asleep you get in immediately” which I just happen to incur into every other weekend I devote to gaming till 4 AM (which would be like till 9 AM for the rest of the continent)
And the third and most uncommon scenario I have face is “A game is very popular right now, everyone is playing regardless of timezone” which has happened a number of times I can count with my both hands, the most recent one being past september the servers were so saturated it took hours to get in even at night time of my region. THIS HOWEVER DID NOT STOP ME FROM USING THE SERVICE, why you may ask, well the answer is more “how”, because the service allows you to pick manually a region to play in, I instead of defaulting to my local server, manually chose one in Europe, and sure enough Europe had many available servers, I could play in again like if it was the first state, this obviously came with a slight increase in input delay but given the PvE nature of my games, I went unbothered with it. Until things calmed down on my region and I could go back to my server
Conclusion is, GFN Free Tier is absolutely worth the cost, and having abused the shit out of it this is good news, it means they really dont intend to shut it down for the foreseeable future which is the most important part, but also it might improve thanks to the generated revenue where there previously was none. Unlike Youtube and Spotify this seems to be non-interruptive which is welcomed as well as obviously you cant just pause a game midway for an ad, they understand this is not how things work.
instead of defaulting to my local server, manually chose one in Europe, and sure enough Europe had many available servers, I could play in again like if it was the first state
That sounds like a bad design…
How could it be? Im sure everyone here is no stranger to automated systems being fucky, if anything giving the user the choice is considerably in favour of them. Besides, im subject to the same system as in my region, I got access to unnocupied servers due to time zone differences.
giving the user the choice is considerably in favour of them
Yes but you can allow the user to have a choice while also having sensible defaults.
Assuming you read my entire parent comment… what would a sensible default do in that case? Put me in a less crowded region compromising quality as I mentioned?
It’s amazing how scummy and gimmicky Nvidia is and the fact that they are, in fact, a real company with real products.
How is it scammy or gimmicky to put ads on a product you don’t pay for? I guess I’m just missing the disconnect here. This service costs Nvidia money to run.
I’m speaking to Nvidia’s tactics in general. See G-Sync
FYI, this is not about free GPUs. “GeForce NOW” is a streaming service.
Headline would’ve been less confusing if it had the service name in quotes or something. I can see how people might read that and assume it means free, ad-supported GPUs. It does not.
Whoops, edited the headline, thanks
We anticipate that this change will reduce average wait times for free users over time.
Sure will.
(Also, TIL that GeForce NOW has a free tier. I assumed it was one of those “pay $10 a month” kinda things even at the lowest level)
Honestly fair to show ads in the free tier. They could also simply not have a free tier.
Because more players will leave the queue by closing the ads in disgust.
Ha, They just won’t count watching ads as waiting time.
I mean it practically doesn’t. I tried it a few times and the queue was so long that I just gave up. And now they want you to watch ads.
I mean, the more revenue free players can generate, the more reason they have to keep them in
If you otherwise think queues will be shorter because people will quit over disgust of ads boy do I have news for you
by allowing you to game on a GeForce PC for free
Are they implying that soon they’re gonna charge you a subscription just to have one of their fuckin’ graphics cards?
This is about GeForce Now, their streaming service.
No? I really hope this isn’t a serious question, because I can’t imagine how you’d come to this conclusion, if you read the full sentence.
No they’re not
I don’t mind this. It’s unreasonable to expect them to provide a free service forever without any kind of monetization.
Is this their cloud gaming service? It was free?
It was straight-up free (as in: no tiers, just free) for a long time to early adopters of the Nvidia Shield. I can’t remember when it was introduced but I think it was with the first iteration of Shield TV.
Yes. There are tiers and the free tier is limited to 1 hour play sessions.
There is a free tier which limits you to 1 hour playtime sessions and does not let you use RTX effects.
While I have no interest in using a service like this, I understand why they are doing this. I would imagine that a service like this probably costs a lot to run and it looks like they are adding them in a sensible way. It’s not like how a lot of mobile games are where the game just randomly stops in the middle of game-play to show you an ad.
Fuck NVIDIA for shutting down GameStream. Killing it had no impact on their servers and this was a tactic to coerce customers to subscribe to their streaming service
At least the reverse engineered foss client is better than the original
As Linus Torvalds eloquently put it:
Nvidia, 🖕 Fuck you!
Fuck NVIDIA
Could have just left it there
giggles in 7900 xtx
People use Nvidia for anything other then a video card and installing drivers without their useless bloat?
I have never once attempted to use them for gaming and never will aside from the hardware. Even then, 1080ti ftw
