GeForce Now, Nvidia’s game streaming service, has been losing games. It started out when Activision pulled all of its games from the service. Nvidia cited some sort of misunderstanding between the two companies during the beta.
Since then they’ve lost Bethesda’s games too, and now 2K is pulling out . If the service keeps going on losing games like this, there’s almost going to be nothing left of the service.
Is there any hope for the fledgling game streaming industry?
It’s pretty simple to see from fans’ reactions, that this is a big blow to GeForce Now. It means that all of the Borderlands titles are gone, along with series’ like Bioshock and XCOM. Some of these games are pretty popular, and they will be missed by service users.
Many of those complaining are questioning why Nvidia even needs permission from publishers. Since GeForce now relies on the subscribers Steam library to actually play games. Many seem to think that they should be able to bypass “greedy’ publishers altogether.
Whatever the case is, GeForce is going to need to do something about this or the service will be dead before it even properly launches. And, that would be a massive shame.
Many proponents of game streaming often have hopes that it’ll be better than contemporary gaming. It’s more convenient, doesn’t require powerful hardware and might have avoided questions of exclusivity which plague other platforms.
The problem with services like GeForce Now and Stadia is that they don’t seem to be proving successful. Stadia is overpriced and uses a ‘less than convenient’ system to declare game ownership. Now GeForce now is displaying just how much of an issue publisher intervention already is for game streaming.
If the industry cannot shake off the bugbears that cling to game streaming, it seems unlikely that the platform will stick around long enough to benefit anybody.