GeForce sometimes
GeForce Now-hold-on-a-minute
100 hour per month?
3.3 hours per day, I reckon 4 hours would probably be enough for 95% of users. They probably know what their user’s averages are though and who this will affect. What I don’t think they realise is the existence of this limit will cause some unusual psychological behaviour and people that never would have hit it will find it uncomfortable enough to stop using it entirely.
What I don’t think they realise is the existence of this limit will cause some unusual psychological behaviour and people that never would have hit it will find it uncomfortable enough to stop using it entirely.
This also why in the early days of ADSL and eventually fibre uncapped home Internet, the ISP would have something called a Fair Usage Policy (FUP) that they’d keep hidden from most users, buried in portals or fine print. The FUP was essentially a soft cap that would excessively throttle your internet speed if you hit the cap. Most users would never hit the cap, so keeping it “secret” was seen as the best way to deal with it, to prevent odd behaviour by users such as switching off the router at night or limiting internet hours.
What’s old is new again.
imagine if this increased reliance on cloud services creates another cisco stock bubble
I don’t understand how cloud gaming works. Won’t you get weird latency issues if the hardware is in some data center far away?
Yes. The whole thing is a terrible idea that exists solely to try to get people into a fully captured rental/subscription ecosystem with worse quality across the board.
Yes, you will get weird latency issues, in every single case. There’s not one service with sub-100ms ping, which translates to 6 whole frames in 60fps gaming. Unplayable for me
You do, though that also depends on your location relative to datacenters in serviced markets.
In practice—I’m a former Stadia customer—it didn’t matter much even for shooters. I did play Cyberpunk 2077, Doom; Wolfenstein, Return to the Savage Planet—and it was okay, even for multiplayer with friends.
To some extent you can predict the world’s as well as the player’s behaviour to put latency mitigating measures in place.
Cloud Gaming changes some dynamics in the relation between “publisher” towards their customers: You no longer have to accept a publisher’s dictate regarding PC requirements, they henceforth need to please a single and stronger party that the cloud gaming provider is. You can no longer remain ignored on bugs and crashes, because (similar to consoles) the blame cannot be summarily shifted on a “non-standard” runtime environment. Also moves the focus from capital (customer, buy to make it run…) to labour (the studio needs to rework…).
You don’t own your “Steam library” anyway, to remind everyone.
China CCP gaming limits smdh
And me, a typical casual gaming family father, still waiting for a pay-per-hour offer.
Won’t be paying 11€ every month just to cover the 0-15 hrs I have typically available for Gaming.
Google Stadia was called “daddia” precisely for this.
When you bough a game through them1 you could play it without subscription in FHD or something to that effect.
1 They reimbursed all purchases, including those made through in-game currency, when Stadia closed.
Yes, I remember!
I considered it sometime during Covid, but just then it became clear that it didn’t have a future any more…
If you’re techy it’s possible to set up an AWS instance that is billed by usage.
I am techy, buuut… did I already mention the typically single-digit hour time budget I have available per month…?
Seriously, the gaming streaming services are completely missing out on the group that the concept would make the most sense for:
People with time-limited and sporadic need to play, who want an easy out-of-the-box solution that is not total technological and financial overkill for their needs.total technological and financial overkill for their needs
Unfortunately, that’s the model. They want you to pay for something you won’t use.
The gym membership model
Subscribed for a month once because a friend really wanted to play PUBG. Of course PUBG doesn’t work on GeForce now either.
I looked into subscribing, but they didn’t have armoured core or the ace pilot game I wanted. I thought cloud gaming was more a service of “I own the game and use your online service for hardware issues” but apparently they gotta have the game too? Wish there was an alternative
It was originally envisaged that way, and that was the service that was initially offered, but publishers took them to court where it was determined that they somehow had a veto — despite the fact that, as you say, the customer has already bought the game
