NVIDIA has announced that starting January 1, 2026, each GeForce NOW cloud gaming subscription will be limited to 100 hours of play time per month. The company is implementing its long-lasting promise revealed in 2024, with the option for users to purchase additional play time as needed. Under the standard Performance tier, which costs $9.99 per month, after the 100-hour play time is reached, users can buy extra 15-hour blocks for $2.99 each. For the Ultimate tier, priced at $19.99 per month, additional 15-hour blocks are available for $5.99 each.
Since months are averaged to about 30.437 days, any play time exceeding the 100-hour limit is rounded up to the next 15-hour block, potentially leading to extra charge if someone wants more play time. For instance, playing around three hours per day (approximately 91 hours per month) remains within the base fee, but playing four hours daily (about 122 hours per month) results in extra costs of approximately $15.97 on the Performance tier or $31.97 on the Ultimate tier.
I can’t recall why, but I was tired of 3DFX. I think they had a monopoly on 3D acceleration or something, and at the time OpenGL seemed like the way to go. An unknown company called Nvidia released a card called the Riva TNT and it contributed to OpenGL becoming widely supported as well as ending 3DFX’s once deserved dominance.
Nvidia kept hitting it out of the park, creating iterations of cards that made it worthwhile to upgrade every several years. I think the competition from ATI (now AMD) may have kept them from falling into the same rut as 3DFX, and as gamers we’ve enjoyed the result of that relationship with good cards from both.
Today…Nvidia has grown into something that had shed its reason for being. It’s crazy to see their logo in business news top stories. What they’re doing, contributing to a tech development that is so far out front of government oversight that could protect people from the consequences, I see them more as a threat to society than anything else. It’s crazy.
You’re a fucking moron if you buy Nvidia at this point and you deserve everything you lose because of it.
You will own nothing but you will pay for it forever.
Yup, and you won’t be able to build your own PC because the same assholes pulling this shit are sucking up all the hardware resources for “AI”
i am the ideal customer for this type of service. i don’t have a gaming computer, and I don’t want to own a gaming computer, but I want to dip into new titles as they come out and indulge once in a while.
i tried geforce now and the waiting rooms and the time caps make it unusable to me. i am paying for convenience here, and yet I can’t play when I want to play, and I get kicked if i play for too long or if I make a coffee. and then I wait again. im paying money to wait in a line on the internet.
im trying to sneak video games into the small amount of time that I have, and it’s not letting me do that. there’s actually no ideal customer for this service. it’s a product that doesn’t make any sense. they can suck my balls with this shit
I hear ya. You probably want something like a Steam Deck. No PC building required and it goes wherever you are.
Also seconding. I don’t have kids but I play dad game hours: I’ve been playing hollowknight a few hours a week for about 6 months. Did the same with Celeste, Quake 1, FF1–6
Aren’t the waiting rooms mainly for the non-paying customers? I thought as soon as you subscribe, you jump way ahead of most other users.
Surprisingly, if they have such waiting times, it seems to indicate they do have people using the service.
The last time I tried it was around the skylines 2 launch and I paid for the premium whatever thing and I definitely waited a lot
Surprisingly, if they have such waiting times, it seems to indicate they do have people using the service.
If there are waiting times on a regular basis, it mostly says they under-bought hardware to service what customers they have. Which comes at the cost of future customers as people hate lines.
But, yeah, I think GeForce Now is the only cloud gaming service that didn’t flop instantly. Though, with the prices listed in OP’s article, the value proposition just seems really bad. They may be killing what audience they have.
Well you forget that the purpose of a subscription is just to take even more money regularly. It was never about providing a service. The fact that they’re limiting playtime shows they have insufficient hardware and have no intentions of correcting the issue. The answer is to just charge more money for the same flawed “service. “
memory prices up, parasites come to feed
The timing is impeccable isn’t it?
The goal is to get you to rent your computer forever.
AI, vast datacenters, hardware “shortages”, cloud services, DRM, TPM… it’s all part of the same pipeline: remove compute power from the user and concentrate it under control of the manufacturers in order to lease it back to the public in tightly controlled environments.
and by the looks of it, its gonna start already enshittified.
You will own nothing and be happy.
I will use old machine until the damn thing quits on me and be happy.
I can’t bring myself to throw anything out anymore. Someday, when all my working PCs have worn out, a $200 bottom of the barrel 32bit netbook could be the last thing standing between me and having to rent compute from some shitty tech company who doesn’t respect my first amendment rights, hides any advanced configuration from the end user, and has an AI constantly rewriting my files to remove any objectionable language, like YouTube or Facebook, but in my home. I’ll hack my toaster to run Linux before I let that happen.
Currently running a ~10 y/o Dell-XPS laptop that still runs absolutely great.
Same, I have a 2011 and 2015 MacBook. And a 2008 iMac and Mac Pro that are about to get Linuxed because the web certs won’t update anymore.
Librewolf has extended the live of the newer machines. But os support is the hardest part.
Where “happy” is a euphemism for something not to be said amongst mixed company.
Cory Doctorow spoke of it in 2011 (transcript here).
Hanlon’s razor applies here. The margins for selling to datacenters are higher for the producers of RAM and GPU’s. The chance that it is some kind of conspiracy is very small.
DRAM manufacturers are not exactly known as the bastion of ethical behaviour though, seen they have been caught numerous times involved in the price fixing conspiracies
I feel like we need a 2020s razor or something. If the degree of nihilism is greater than the degree of absurdity then its probably true.
Capitalism will find ways to create capital, usually ending in rents. Neither free markets nor regulated can solve this as it is rooted in a contradiction.
Capitalism has carcinisation for rent. If something stay solvent long enough, it will turn into a rent seeking subscription.
Haaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
I wish I could find the people on Reddit that called me a lunatic when I said subscription services always enshitify, NO MATTER WHAT. It’s a matter of when, not if.
Do you think Dropout will enshitify? It’s one of the best streaming services, and tons of people on the fediverse say it’s the only subscription they have. They raised their prices last year by $1, but let people keep their old price if they stay subscribed.
Is it a non-profit? No? It will enshitify.
And this is combined with cutting Blackwell production by 40% and exacerbating a market already dominated by scalpers and AI data centers. Everything is getting enshittified, subscription just one component of it.
I’ve always held out for PCMR but these companies are making it near impossible - or just prohibitively expensive - to be a PC gamer.
and they just dropped support for pascal :/
Like every comment like yours that I have ever seen, I would bet money you didn’t quite say what you are claiming to say here, didn’t say it in a way that would imply the same thing, and didn’t get quite the reaction you are saying you got.
Found the subscriber.
Rent your shit, and be a slave of price changes.
When you agree to a subscription, you are enrolling to get fuck, sooner or later.
This is ultimately just punching sideways and down though.
These companies will win when your strategy is to simply shit on other people for existing.
You may not think that is what you’re doing but it is. How so? Because while you care about this area of life enough to get into the details, for other people, their areas of care are completely different, and it is unreasonable for you to expect everyone to care about precisely what you care about.
As such, punching down and sideways only serves the purpose of making an environment where only the rich and powerful band together, and the poor (us) routinely infight and chop off our own legs rather than realizing that these megacorps hiring leagues of lobbyists, psychologists, marketers, etc know exactly how to push, and know that exactly the person you are bitching at will almost certainly never see your comment, or will consider it hostile and irrelevant so it wont matter either way.
What in the literal fuck are you on about. You are worried someone is going to take this comment personally, get hurt, and then run to their corporate overlords!?
That bitching about subscriptions is actually an attack on those who use the service and not a word to the wise that enshitification is coming for all your subscriptions.
I think you are taking this in perhaps the most bizarre way possible.
100hours is quite a bit but also fuck Nvidia.
100hours is quite a bit
10hrs for 10 days… oops busted…
Oh dear… I was in hospital a few weeks ago and I’ve been recovering at home. In the last two weeks I’ve manly played three games: 64 hours in the first, 50 hours in the second, and 10 hours in the third (that one was all in one day)
I’d never use a thing like GeForce Now either way, but I’d be boned hahaha
How good is hospital recovery?
Sure, there’s some cons, but you basically get a free card to game relentlessly, undisturbed, and guilt-free. Tragically, you eventually heal up and have to go back to being a normie.
Oh my gawd it’s best thing. Hospital was insane but very interesting and by the time I got home I was feeling pretty awesome… my boss told me to not think about work and that he set me up for a leave of absence I still get paid for with HR. I’m treasuring every day.
Yeah that was basically my thought too. I probably do less than a quarter of that on average, but that’s not really the point. I should be allowed as much time as I want. Not that I use a Nvidia subscription anyway, but still. This makes me mad on behalf of other people.
I can’t imagine this will make Nvidia much money at all. The vast, vast majority of people aren’t playing more than 100 hours of videogames a month but having a tagline that you can play as much as you want is a very attractive offer to a consumer, at least to me.
Aren’t they making a shitton of money? They can’t even use the usual enshittification excuses, this is just being greedy dicks.
Gamer Nexus said it best pointing it out that the tech bros want to do to computers what private equity did to the housing market of turning everything into subscriptions.
The excuse is, and has always been, “Because we can”. Never think otherwise.
They can’t even use the usual enshittification excuses, this is just being greedy dicks.
The usual enshitification excuses are companies just being greedy dicks, and more than anything, a lack of regulation enforcement existing to stop companies simply outspending other companies out of business.
There is little difference between enshitificstion and being greedy dicks.
A shitton is not the amount they are aiming for. All is the goal.
saw this coming the second I heard about GeForce cloud gaming…never in a million years will I subscribe to play games. wow was the only exception to that rule previously, but now I just run my own server locally so even that, never again
Ngreedia
What a way to basically double prices for users that actually use the service as it was promoted…
Fuck them as hard as they’re willing to be fucked 🤷
Lol.
