Typical capitalism. At least there are other competitors. I hope AMD and Intel can take advantage of this news and undercut Nvidia maybe.
Nono, they raise prices with parity such that they’re still technically minimally cheaper.
That being said, I don’t think AMD and Intel have similar game streaming services. It’s pretty much GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud streaming as the big dogs.
Do we need cloud streaming? Honestly.
Do we need gaming?
It’s not a need thing, it’s just more options for people that want it.
Options are great, but generally speaking companies tend to sunset options that are less profitable, regardless if it provides a better experience.
Case in point, once movie and TV streaming got popular, selling that content in physical or even digital form died off but it didn’t die completely. Plenty of people still like to own the media they pay for, plenty of people still like physical media collections that can never, ever be taken away when a server gets shut down. Having that option is great, too.
But it’s a less profitable option. So, to spite what some want, certain content is just streaming only now, while the prices rise. And that’s the new world we allowed ourselves to be shepherded into. While we were blinded by convenience, they discreetly shut the door behind us, and now there’s no going back (without piracy).
So yes, game streaming itself is a great option to have for many. That’s not the problem.
The trajectory is the problem.
It’s also worth pointing out any direction that furthers our dependence on the ISPs not being awful is asking for trouble. For example, remember when Charter was allowed to acquire Time Warner Cable and become Spectrum? They promised regulators they would not impose bandwidth caps for 7 years, and as of today it’s been 7 years and 30, days.
Do we need it? I’m not sure, but I am sure that all things cloud is an inevitability.
Going from dumb terminals to beefy individual networked computers and back a few times was a thing for a while and eventually it has settled into a use case specific balance because it is a balance between costs of centralizing the computing, networking, and people managing both. Throw networking connection issues for many locations and it is clear that everything cloud doesn’t work for everything.
Centralized gaming has already shown the same complexities and can never be fully put into the cloud even if that will work for a large portion of games and uses.
10 years from now, at an Applzonooglsoft Developers Conference: the new cloud… is YOU!
crowd gasps and then immediately is turned into fluffy little floating data center server racks
You: I FORETOLD THIS DAY!
And they told in communism you will not have anything
It’s a good option for people who don’t want to maintain a pc or want their game installs and updates to be instantaneous. You can play anywhere you have decent wifi so it’s kind of like having both a steam deck and a desktop pc, and probably cheaper than maintaining and upgrading both
Yes, it’s fantastic.
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Have better Internet 🤷♂️
I’ve already addressed the costs below. I’ve saved more than $3000 in 2 years on gamepass and gamefly vs purchasing.
If I need to go back and open something I’m very happy to dip into my savings pool every once in a while.
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🤷♂️ works for me
If you only use beefy computers for gaming the subscription seems very reasonable actually.
You pay for the internet anyway. Geforce now monthly sub costing 9$ a month it will take 16 years for you to spend a total of 1800$ the price of a good gaming computer. It is enough years for tech to improve significantly that the computer if you had brought it would have been obsolete by then
Nein! - Doch! - Ohh!
Of course a new service only stays cheap until they reached critical mass. Same with gamepass and every subscription services. That’s why I try to subscribe to as little as possible. Oh, btw Netflix does again increase prices too.
100usd for ad free youtube 2034
People in this sub were insisting YouTube should be a subscription service (hilariously, “from launch”) in the YouTube ad-blocker thread lol
*250 USDT ftfy
Per week
subscriptions == Corpo tax for the plebs
🙄
I’ve spent $75 for 3 years of gamepass. It has been hands down without argument the best value in gaming I’ve ever seen in a service. You are delusional.
Almost like they price it cheap until they conquer the market, then jack up prices
MS probably doesn’t even make a profit with GamePass. They spend hundreds of millions to get Triple-A games on the service. GamePass is great for the consumer but in the end it will destroy the industry as we know it and give MS way too much power in the industry. People like to shit on Epic for their exclusivity deals, but MS is doing the same with GamePass. MS is trying to monopolize the customer base. And once they have achieved that they will not only raise their prices but lower the amount they will give to developers. And before you say MS doesn’t do exclusivity deals and you can still buy those games on Steam, many people will stop buying games if they can get them from a subscription service for cheap. Like the commenter above.
Phil Spencer confirmed it’s not making money in the FTC leaks. That’s why in MS’s financials they don’t disclose gamepass financials.
It actually staggers me how widespread the belief that MS won’t up prices is. I wonder if they thought the same about Netflix or cable TV subscriptions? Lol
And yeah, also in the FTC leaks MS stated they’d love to do a hostile takeover of Nintendo or Valve if they got the choice. I don’t know why people think Microsoft are on their side. They’re a 2.5 trillion dollar company with a history of anti-competitive behaviour lol
I dont think anyone doubts the prices will go up, but if it costs less than a AAA game every few months then people will pay it for the ability to play those games without a console or PC and to be able to play multiple games for the price of one
And again if that happens I’ll happily evaluate the value. For now I’ll choose to save thousands and use that money in the future for theoretical price hikes.
It won’t, it’s just slippery slope bullshit, but I’m ready with three money I saved.
You don’t think MS will up prices? Lol
Phil Spencer in the MS FTC leaks literally said that Gamepass isn’t making money. Now, personally, I’m of the belief that MS is a for-profit company rather than a charity, in which case they’ll up prices.
They have to up prices or shut down gamepass. That’s not my opinion, that’s capitalism. Microsoft will not keep gamepass if there’s no possibility of making money from it, and there isn’t at current pricing (source: Microsoft).
And save thousands? Thousands? You’d seriously be buying more than 33 AAA games each year for full retail price? Then never playing them again? Sounds like you’re exaggerating by a pretty large amount lol
Oh at least 30. I probably clear a game every 2-3 weeks. And even if they up prices
I’ll deal with prices as they come for now, I’m saving, yes thousands and playing more games than ever.
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Yes valve, ea, Ubisoft, Nintendo, sony, all on the verge of bankruptcy. I’m sure all of them will crack any day now.
This only really works if they start making games exclusive to gamespass
I don’t think that necessarily has to be true.
Even so, MS is already dabbling with buying publishers and wielding them as a weapon through enforcing exclusivity. See buying Bethesda and destroying development of the PS5 port for Starfield. I think it’s naive to think this will get better and not worse.
And they will definitely not charge you more for it when they are a monopoly, no siree
Any day now valve, Sony, Nintendo, ea, Ubisoft will all fall!
Who says they’ll have to?
I can still boot up games I’ve owned since the age of 5 or games on steam that lost their licensing like Prey (2006) or some Lego games, come back to me next month when you can’t play Persona 5 Royal as it’s getting pulled due to licensing. Time and time again, subscription models are great value until a point where the market share is big enough and the user base is invested enough that the price gets hiked. Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t make me delusional, and frankly that was a pretty rude comment.
I, and the vast majority of the gaming community, will play a game once and never pick it up again. Most don’t even finish.
For the one of two games I might actually want to play again, I’m happy to toss an additional $10 at the 10 year discounted rate.
I’m still $55 ahead of you purchasing on release.
Same with gamefly. $15 a month and I’ve saved thousands and thousands of dollars renting for 2 weeks and sending it back.
Doing some napkin math:
I spend $210 annually on gamefly + gamepass. I have played no less than 30 games this year (it’s higher but I’m not keeping track). That’s $1800 USD I’ve saved. I’m more than happy to eat into that and purchase a game if need be.
Ownership of video games, is VASTLY over rated and valve has you by the genitals.
I’m very skeptical that you’re describing the majority, let alone vast.
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That’s a fair assesment. But what’s the ratio games that you actually go back to compared to the amount of games you own in total? Unless you only play very few games, the amount of games a person owns vastly outnumbers the games they actually go back and play multiple times. Just looking at my steam library, I own hundreds of games I’ve completed once and have never touched again along with about 2 dozen I actually go back and play occasionally.
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I don’t think the “actually finish games” was the unlikely thing about what he said
That “only worth playing once” thing only applies to story heavy, fixed map, pure single-player games, which are mainly a sub-set of AAA games, typically on consoles.
(Or multiplayer games when somebody only plays those games were their friends are, so the game stops being fun if most of their friends aren’t there anymore, so naturally such people never get back to those)
Further, even amongst that kind of game, some are so good that they’re fun again to play after some time (though it usually takes a couple of years to forget enough of the details for it to be fun again). For example, Fallout 3.
Methinks you’re a very young gamer, who is mainly fad driven hence buys the same AAA games as his friends and doesn’t buy indie games (which is where you’ll find the most replayable games of all, as indies often have generated maps since they can’t afford to spend millions of dollars on people doing level design) so yeah, all you’ve ever seen is games that are only fun once or for a very limited time period.
Youthfullness would also explain why you confuse your own behaviour with “the vast majority of the gaming community”. (Which is extra funny because the average age of gamers nowadays is somewhere in the mid 30s).
I would be seriously surprised if you were an older gamer as they’re more likely to buy games for their fun factor - not fashionability amongst peers or last gen graphics - hence sooner or later end up playing some indie game or other with generated maps, plus are much more likely to have picked up again some game they played and finished years ago and still fondly remember, just to discover it’s actually fun again.
Let’s not gatekeep “real gamers”.
You should also read his comment again. He is not saying that a game is only worth playing once because the story or game is linear. Although no sources are cited, he is probably right that a fair percentage of people pick up a game and drop it soon after because it wasn’t what they thought it would be or any number of other reasons.
Even if you are an indie gamer, the sheer number of indie games that come out each year is overwhelming, and again a lot are not super polished so you can probably also see people picking it up, playing it, not being impressed and then dropping the game.
So why spend $10 a pop per game when you can pay for one month and enjoy many of them?
There is no need to be materialistic. Yes there are games you will want to go back to in a few years or take your time with, but there are many many games that you may never touch again. If you think this is a minority opinion, check out some Steam stats. I think they support OPs argument.
There are also reasons subscription based models can and do suck, there is a reason they are popular.
Yeah, ok.
That is indeed a different view of that post which makes sense.
yeah personally I dont like the subscription model and wished more people setup their own server at home to stream their own plex and stream their own steam-headless or virtual machines but that just isnt realistic and people love thier streamed content more and more. Just look at me Im talking through you from a virtual machine on my server VPN’d from my phone connected to a monitor and keyboard. I dont carry a laptop anymore I just plug my phone in at work or at home and just use parsec
What a fun story.
My NES came with Mario 3, I raided before plains of power made EQ easy, and I spent hours chopping wood by hand in ultima because I refused to get a paperweight to hold down the hot key.
They are certainly games out there that have a longer shelf life. It’s not all of them nor should it be and it’s not how most people play games unless heavily multiplayer focused.
Well, somebody else provided a different take on what you meant (which is that people try and ditch lots of games which are shit, only settling down with some good ones) that makes sense.
Personally that’s not how I do it (I would rather not waste time and trying tons of games if free), but that’s me and I’m not going to claim that’s how most people go about consuming games (I doubt it is, to be fair).
game pass is a really good value if you ask me I don’t pay for it anymore but I have for a while
You’re right. It is really good value. For now. That’s how all of these subscription services start.
My netflix was once £6. Recently they’ve announced it’ll be going up to £18, despite it losing a bunch of shows and films that used to be on there.
Back a long time ago, my SkyTV package cost very little each month. Now some packages cost hundreds.
Adobe and others have done the same thing with their subscription services.
I don’t know why people are in denial that MS will do the same thing everyone else has done when Microsoft themselves said Gamepass isn’t profitable in the FTC leaks.
What a hot take! People want to hate the service on ideological platforms. They don’t want to see them math.
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Ok. Enjoy buying each game separately. $75 will get you a singular game. Don’t play it all at once!
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And you’re bad at math and financials if you think it’s better to buy a singular game for $75.
For what it’s worth, I buy every game I really like on Steam (I have over 1200 games on Steam), but I use GamePass for everything else.
I’ve saved so much money using GamePass. Sorry, but I’m not paying for Forza, Flight Simulator, Minecraft Legends, etc. All of those games I beat in less than a week, and they cost $100+ CAD. Literally saved money by not buying them, but got to play them all fully.
You beat Forza and MS Flight Sim in a week… yeah we’re different people.
Forza 1 week. Flight Sim was fun for less than a week. That’s ~2 weeks. One subscription for GamePass is 30 days. If you cancel before the 30 days, you get a refund for the remaining time.
It’s quite literally a no brainer to take advantage of GamePass right now.
People who will comment “ya but you don’t own them anymore”, I don’t care. I have 0 urge to play either game, because they are finished. I essentially saved $280 CAD playing on GamePass.
Ratio’ed.
Price increases seem inevitable for any service where a company licenses content to stream to customers. GeForce Now is going to be in a constant cycle of content agreements expiring and creators wanting more money, that extra cost gets passed on to customers. Contrast that with just buying a game, buy it once and you’re done (generally.)
I don’t use the service, but I believe you bring and install your own games. They’re just offering a remote computer.
At least, last I checked.
I believe back when it was in beta a good few years ago, it was a remote PC, but now it’s only whatever games are on the service, with more added about every week via licensing them. You do, however, bring your own games, that part is right, just you can only play the ones you own that are licensed to be run on it.
That would have changed within the last 6 months then, we had it then and as far as I know it was just a remote pc
its been like that for a good while now, I remember when I first tried geforce now playing cod 2019, then at work I wanted to setup my classes during lunch and it was gone, turned out blizzard/activision got mad that nvidia was letting people play their game even though you had to own the game so they pulled it off the service
Back when it was free for shield users, it was game streaming
Now I just get ads on my shield for a bunch of new releases I can buy for streaming on it
Gamestream (remote pc) was something else but I guess it’s incorporated into it now
Ah I didn’t understand that. That’s almost worse though, that’s buying the game and then paying to play it.
I haven’t done the math, but I’m actually not sure what’s more expensive: Maintaining a performant desktop PC, including paying power bills, or subscribing to GeForce Now. PC parts and electricity are both pretty expensive in my country.
I’m pretty happy with the service. Can play Cyberpunk at 4k, 120 fps on a Mac Mini without noticeable lag. Only major problem is the limited amount of games supported.
Owning a computer, especially if a desktop, makes more sense, in my understanding.
In my country, a gaming laptop is about €2500, while a decent gaming desktop starting on the €800.
Even when factoring in the energy, unless running a 1KW+ machine, 7 days a week, non stop, it still makes sense. You have your data in your machine, in your home.
These machines are a bit above decent, though. Nvidia claims gtx 4080-equivalent performance on their subscription ‘ultimate’ tier. Those cards alone start at the equivalent of around 1400 euros in my country (Denmark). You’d still need CPU, motherboard, storage, ram and PSU. I’m not sure exactly how the ‘ultimate’ servers perform in benchmarks, though. I hear their processors are relatively underpowered.
A top of the line gaming desktop here (Hello from Portugal!) and I do mean top of the line, competitive esports gaming, will cost about €3000.
But when you decompose the machine, a good deal of money goes towards fluff like rgb, rgb components, glass panel box, etc - yes, I’m judging here - that if swapped out for non flashy items can shave off €200 or more off the top.
Plus, a gaming desktop can be assembled incrementally and will usually last longer and components can be used from one machine to the next.
Given you are playing for entertainment and not prpfessionally, a machine can give you years of joy.
Sure, I get that. Also, you’ll still need some sort of machine in your home to handle the streamning. And if you want to enjoy that 4k 120 fps, you’ll need a monitor with at least those capabilities, as well as other peripherals. I came from an older gaming PC with a 1080 and a 4 year old Kabylake processor that MS decided wouldn’t officially be supported for their latest OS anymore. Jumped on the Apple Sillicon-wagon with the Mini M1. For now, streaming works out well.
Guess the cost tradeoff depends on how much you play and how updated you keep your PC. My PC can’t play Cyberpunk at 4k 120fps. You must have good Internet though.
I have personally done the math for myself, and it is ultimately cheaper to subscribe to the middle tier of GFN. That was before any price hikes though, I am yet to pay or calculate the new prices, not sure when they start, but I am fairly sure it’s still cheaper at least here where I live.
In addition, it relieves a lot of stress and time spent on buying, fetching, installing and changing the thermal pastes and keeping it clean etc, as well as doesn’t contribute to the already barely tolerable heat in the summer, which high-end GPUs tend to do under stress.
All around it’s much more convenient for me, since I only need those high-end specs for gaming, and have a good light laptop setup for work and other uses.
But YMMV, of course.
Edit: We do have very affordable and fast internet here though, so that’s probably a thing not available everywhere, which would make this much less convenient. In my country, it’s not a concern even traveling.
You can still play it on any computer you own. You just login with your steam account.
It’s renting a computer but it doesn’t actually work like that since shitty publishers can get force them to not allow you to download your bought games on rented computers.
I still support buying a decent graphics card and a game rather than paying a subscription while also buying the game. Their basic plans costs 10 euro per month which is 240 euro for 2 years which is average cost for a decent gaming card. And best part is you own it. You can get NVIDIA 3060 for that amount. Which is amazing card.
A 3060 is only 240 euro?
You can get them for $399 here in Canada which converts to 276 euro. Seems reasonable they might be able to find one for 240 in their region.
Got the 12GB one for 200€ last week for my gf.
I would rather get rx 6650 xt for gaming primarily. Don’t know about RTX 4000 series or RX 7000 series though.
7900xtx all the way
Totally different price class.
Geforce Now is not at all about cost to me. I use GeForce Now because it allows me to play on my laptop, tablet, phone or TV anywhere I have an internet connection. I don’t have or want a desktop, and prefer to have a thin and light laptop for travel rather than a gaming laptop.
89kr/month for Denmark. That’s 2136DKK for 2 years of continuous service. The cheapest RTX 3060 right now is 2199DKK. But guess what? I don’t have a tower pc. So I would need a CPU, memory, storage, case, PSU. I won’t bother putting together a system but if I search the web budget builds are set for around 800USD atm. That’d be around 5600DKK or more than 5 years of GeForce Now. Tbh I think it’s not a bad deal.
Besides, as a casual gamer I keep cancelling the service when I don’t need it. Right now I’m signed up because I enjoy starfield. I’ll probably unsubscribe when I’m done with that. Or at least over Christmas because I know I won’t have time to game.
Plus I love the flexibility of streaming to my TV, tablet, phone, laptop.
My biggest problem is that it’s neither possible to pirate games nor mod them. Shadow is the solution for that but it’s too expensive IMO.
Buy the hardware so you can offset the costs by pirating all the games
Two years of subscription buys a ps5 or a steamdeck, if one want the “easy” experience
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Its never enough. Its called unlimited growth. Its why most of us aren’t going to live until our natural death age, but will likely perish due to environmental factors like extreme weather, plague, famine, etc. Its gonna start sucking at around 3C.
Man everybody’s hiking up prices. Where’s the money gonna come from to pay these, though? Considering thanks to inflation a lot of us have to use that money for more important things like… food.
People are still paying these prices. All industries are booming. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour made like $750M. Most countries went overboard on stimulus spending during covid. To the tune of trillions of dollars. That money is still slowly making its way into the economy. I think it will take years to normalise. In the mean time, US debt is at $33T and climbing fast, meaning we should expect QE at some time in the future, exacerbating inflation further.
The prescribed solution to this mess is crystal clear: higher taxes AND reduced spending. Both. At the same time. Very important. Otherwise we should expect inflation and rates to remain high for the foreseeable future.
But line has to go up
yeah, that’s the goal of any company. Why is this news?
I think I saw somewhere that one could setup something similar using an AWS instance with a gaming GPU and some opensource app for the streaming part? Has someone tried that? How does it compare in terms of costs to NVidia’s GeForce Now?
I doubt it’ll work as well and it’s probably more expensive
There are some projects form a few years ago. Mostly using Parsec but there might be more, even open source, options in that area.
But all the DIY solutions will require you to have some knowledge in regards to public clouds. But all-in-all they shouldn’t be that expensive as they generally make use of cheap instances and automatic shutdowns. So you only pay for the time you are actually playing plus the storage.
One quick search showed https://github.com/badjware/aws-cloud-gaming but I can’t say anything about the working state of that repository. But it should be a good starting point.
Another link https://github.com/LGUG2Z/parsec-ec2
I’ve done it years ago. If I remember correctly it was more expensive than GF Now
What a dumb article title
Their 6.2b profit wasn’t from GeForce Now, it was from their overpriced GPU’s.
Products are priced based on their cost/value, not the companies overall profit margins
And game streaming is such a profitable market segment too. I mean look at how well Stadia is doing.
They failed because no one could trust them. I never bought into it at all because I knew one day they’d shut it down, and they did.
Google ruined their reputation, and people are going to have a tough time buying into anything they release. I really only buy their phones and use their services that I am not tied into, such as YouTube, Maps, Translate, etc. All of their services where I am buying things, or hosting my data, I jumped shipped a couple years ago.
I mean shit, I bought their Google WiFi and they just straight up fucked all their users and released their Nest WiFi, pretending the Google WiFi doesn’t exist.
Most normal users don’t view Google like this,
I work retail and customers don’t think this thoroughly about Google or any other brands really
Pretty much everyone I know refuses to buy into anything Google releases now. Not because they are tired of losing money or support, but they hate having to try and move their stuff over to a different service.
The average user won’t care about firmware updates or that they lost a few bucks, but they hate when they need to figure out how to move their music over to Spotify or lose the ability to cloud print.
Products are priced based on their cost/value
Ah, yes and the world is full of rational actors with perfect information.
“Products are priced based on their cost/value, not the companies overall profit margins”
It doesn’t take much to observe that this is just incorrect.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, and they teach that in your Intro to Economics course, but in reality it just doesn’t work that way.
It does, it’s just that the “value” gets fucked and manipulated in ways that are bad for the consumer
