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.
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 have had a founders membership for many years. Been holding onto it because of I cancel I would lose the founders discount. It dawned on me that I’ve used this service less than half a dozen times in all the years I have had it and it’s been a pretty poor experience each time. With that, and the fact that Nvidia has become an albatross around the neck of the worlds economy, I decided to finally cancel.
A giant sea bird?
Hah thanks. I had no idea about the reference and I was like “That’s a pretty weird animal to use in this context”
It’s still occasionally used, but man it’s an archaic reference!
You’re a fucking moron if you buy Nvidia at this point and you deserve everything you lose because of it.
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 the sleep function on Steam Deck is pretty good. I bring mine to work and grab some offline playtime during my 15 minute breaks, and sometimes during my 30 min lunch after i eat. No Man’s Sky is chill and easy to pickup/putdown, Minecraft as well. I’m sure other titles would work as well.
Absolutely. I play mine during my lunch break at work since I got it a year ago.
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
I so badly want one but I’m saving up for a laptop (framework 12 probably) but I want it so badddddddddd
I’ll only get one after I get the laptop, don’t worry! :D
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.
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. “
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
I’ll never game or do my general computing as a subscription to a server.
If it comes a day when I can’t buy a GPU and run a game myself, I’m not going to game anymore. Simple as that.
Modern integrated GPUs have gotten pretty good lately. If it comes a day where we can’t buy GPUs, we’ll be able to enjoy older titles without much trouble at least…
Until the day CPUs aren’t sold to you either. Just the weakest most useless little blob of silicon that’s enough to connect to their servers, and then you run everything on the server.
Bold of you to assume they won’t just market to the top 10%. They already make up over 55% of market trends and are steadily growing. Eventually, companies will consider it too risky or burdensome to market and sell to the bottom 90%.
And those people will also be fucked over by these companies.
Or you could just buy a used gpu that runs 10 times faster than an integrated one and doesn’t overheat your CPU in CPU demanding games… Just sayin
A used gpu equivalent to an igpu is dirt cheap
emulators for the win baby!!! (assuming it’s all games between snes to dreamcast) :P
Xemu does decent. I am torn on whether changing loaders has any real benefit on the emulator though. I used third party loaders back in the day on the original machine… (I miss my baby. Softmodded via MechAssault, led changes, 250Gb HDD installed. Sadly, somehow shorted it out whilst copying from a 250GB HDD to a larger one that I was going to use for more storage. Magic smoke, BIOS corrupted)
Same but I’ll be old
my general computing as a subscription to a server.
You say this, but I think most of us have offloaded formerly local computing to a server of some kind:
- Email organization, including folders and attachments, has mostly shifted from a desktop client saving offline copies retrieved and then deleted from the server, to web and app and even IMAP interfaces to the canonical cloud server organization.
- A huge chunk of users have shifted their productivity tasks (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, image editing and design) to web-based software.
- A lot of math functionality is honestly just easier to plug into web-based calculators for finance, accounting, and even the higher level math that Wolfram Alpha excels at.
- Lots of media organization, from photos to videos to music, are now in cloud-based searchable albums and playlists.
All these things used to be local uses of computing, and can now be accessed from low powered smartphones. Things like Chromebooks give a user access to between 50-100% of what they’d be doing on a full fledged high powered desktop, depending on the individual needs and use cases.
Almost all of my desktop usage is gaming. No, I don’t think a Chromebook and a server somewhere is going to replace that for me.
I think they mean stuff like cpu and gpu processing power for games and similar? anyways have a great day and happy holiday!
those are good points though
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.
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.
Did we not just have a clear cut example of DRAM manufacturers working out back room deals with OpenAI for 40% of global supply, causing the price of RAM to skyrocket? Seems pretty conspiratorial to me.
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.
Cory Doctorow spoke of it in 2011 (transcript here).
and by the looks of it, its gonna start already enshittified.
Yes, but this only works if said concentrated manufacturer group also holds all IP and power means to prevent competition on the market they don’t want filled.
It’s like a monopoly protected by navy, something right out of 1600s, if such a state of things is established in some countries, all the others will have an advantageous route of peaceful development, except with higher risk of war and sabotage from the former group. Almost like colonial unpleasantness between Iberian monarchies on one side and England and Netherlands on the other. From the point of the former, they had the Papal blessing and divine ownership of the New World divided between them, and the latter were heretics and thieves. From the point of the latter, the former didn’t have any exclusive rights to unpopulated by Europeans lands overseas. While the popular narrative (right out of Sabatini’s books and such) portrays the former as bad and the latter as good, I’ll notice that the former did less of racism and slavery and genocide, and their former colonies are culturally mixed unique nations. Unlike British colonies, which are all, even USA, sort of England overseas with diverged dialects.
The point is - there are legal arguments which might eventually become bigger conflicts.
So - you won’t do anything to already consolidated power. This might become a new global split, in political dimension driven by economic interest. Already in testing, in fact, with Gaza and other recent conflicts. And it would be a shame if most western countries turned up on the wrong side, because that wouldn’t make the other side better than it really is, but it really would have an advantage in development. You can forbid people to produce and own universal personal computers for all kinds of use only if they live under your control.
HA!
Oh look a pricey solution to an issue they made, who would have seen it coming?
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.
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 overlo
No. What the fuck are you on about.
Your malicious read of my pretty clear comment is so obviously absurd its like Im talking to a rage bait ai bot…
Their comment placed blame on people for simply existing in a world that is increasingly enshitified by subscriptions and my comment clearly was aimed at reaiming that blame at who deserves it rather than fighting people in the same class as you.
I think you are taking this in perhaps the most bizarre way possible.
Says the person doing mental gymnastics to read the comment in a nonsensical way so they can be toxic about it.
You personalized this beyond all reason. There was no malicious reading just someone trying to understand what you where trying to say.
Apparently, I was dead on. You are trying to say someone that is commenting your subscriptions are going to get enshitified is somehow a personal attack rather than a statement of fact.
Clearly you are some kind of person who acts like an extremely sensitive bootlicker rather than a rational actor who is here to discuss. I would not suggest taking it personally or acting like a bootlicker in the future if you can avoid it.
memory prices up, parasites come to feed
The timing is impeccable isn’t it?
Friendly reminder that there are a bunch of fantastic indie games out there that don’t have insane graphic card requirements for a smooth frame rate.
At this point I scowel at any game with higher minimum hardware requirements than fallout 4. Like, come on, did you really need all that shit?
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.
Get Boosteroid instead, even has a winter deal on price at the moment.
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.
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.
Dunno, still pretty cheap for so much entertainment
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.
Yea… 100 hours a month of your life consuming 1 form of media is… a lot.
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.
There is little difference between enshitificstion and being greedy dicks.
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.
A shitton is not the amount they are aiming for. All is the goal.
I’m guessing they want to sell more computing power to AI bc they make more that way
