I’ve had this post in me for awhile now but each time I sit down to try and write it nothing but an angry screed comes out. So today I am going to try going about this from a different angle. There is an issue that is occurring and each time I try and talk about it, I wind up catching shit about my “opinion”. I’ve fired off random tweets on three occasions and each time I’ve gotten someone telling me that my thoughts were more or less wrong because I was not viewing things from the standpoint of the business and only looking at things from the viewpoint of the consumer. The thing is… while I have lots of friends in the industry and can often times give them credit for their stances on issues… at the end of the day I am a consumer and at the end of the day right or wrong I want the thing that is going to be best for me and others like me.
However we are already veering dangerously towards the anger zone and I am going to take a step back and explain why Remote Gameplay matters to me. I have a weird use case namely because I game from two different locations in my house. The secret of my marital bliss has been to be flexible and being able to hang out somewhere other than sequestered up in my office with my gaming equipment. As a result I have a gaming laptop downstairs in the living room and my fancy gaming desktop upstairs in my office. Gaming laptops however are a frustrating proposition in that they just don’t stay viable for very long in the grand scheme of things. The hardware placed inside of them is lower end to deal with power draw and battery life issues and as a result you wind up needing to replace them roughly every two years to keep playing modern games.
That is not an expense that I enjoy and as a result over the last three years I have been exploring various options that would allow me to be on the sofa on my laptop but actually playing games upstairs off my gaming desktop. Remote Play and Game Streaming is nothing new and it has been available in one form or another since at least 2014. There are various issues around it related to input latency and graphical hiccups but some almost seven years later most of these issues have been ironed out. Steam In Home Streaming works well for anything that runs through the steam client and supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Then there is my tool of choice called Parsec that supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Web Browser.
The vast majority of my gaming is done while sitting downstairs on the laptop and remotely playing games off my Desktop upstairs using Parsec running in LAN mode. That said I could just as easily connect into my machine from outside of my four walls and remotely play my games on a mobile device. If I so chose I could also go out and rent a box on Amazon or Paperspace and connect my Parsec client out to the cloud server that I am renting and install my games that way. I personally don’t need to go down this path since I have a good gaming machine that I control access to, but I know folks who are doing this and it is working fine for them. Just like the server room has moved to entirely virtual servers that may or may not exist on premises, this heralded the beginning of that being a game for your gaming machine as well.
Why GeForce Now is important is that it took this concept that has already existed for years… and refined it down to something that someone who is not technically savvy could do. It also took the madness of a multi-tiered cloud provider billing system and burned it down to a simple number… $4.95 a month. If you had an Nvidia graphics card in your gaming desktop and one of the many Nvidia devices like the shield… you have been able to stream your games for years now. However GeForce Now blew away all of the artificial barriers and just allowed you to have that same experience without owning the Gaming Desktop and instead renting one sitting somewhere in an Nvidia server farm… or more likely a nameless server farm that Nvidia is themselves renting space in.
Stadia, XCloud and Playstation Now are gaming platforms designed to alter your game buying preferences and channel your focus in a new direction. XCloud and Playstation Now are both following the Netflix model, where your subscription fee gives you access to several titles in their library of licenced titles. Stadia goes down a different path trying to replace both the method of playing the game and the purchase point for that game as well. You make your game purchases through Stadia and you play them within their walled garden on any device you choose to do so. GeForce Now however is something completely different and is not a gaming platform, but instead a hardware surrogate. You still have to purchase games like normally through Steam or Epic Games Store and instead of installing them on your own machine you connect out to your temporary server in the cloud and install the game there. From there you can play that game and maintain progress in that game on any device that supports GeForce Now.
So my frustrations rise when people keep calling GeForce Now a gaming platform and treating it like an equivalency to the other Game Streaming Platforms. While I agree wholeheartedly that a Developer should be able to dictate what store fronts their games are available from, and choose which locations that they want to offer them. I disagree completely that those same Developers should have a single bit of control over the hardware we gamers choose to play those games on. If I go to Best Buy, I can purchase a brand new laptop, take it home and install the Steam client on it and within a few minutes pending download speeds be playing a game on it. When I connect to a cloud server with GeForce Now I am doing the same thing. They have provided the Steam Client for me, but I still navigate to my game that I own in my Steam Library and choose to install it and then moments later play it.
The license for the game is between the end user, steam and the game developer and Nvidia does not factor into that process at all. Nvidia is providing me the gamer with a hardware surrogate. I am renting computing power in the cloud just like I would if I choose to go with Amazon Web Services, Paperspace or Azure. I could achieve the exact same result by doing these things as well and the developer would likely have no clue at all that I am doing it. The only reason why this has become an issue over the last few weeks is because Nvidia has managed to package this same service up with a neat bow and offer it up at a reasonable price point that is enough to get people to jump on the bandwagon and start trying to play games remotely. The truth is that I have been subscribed for a few weeks now and I am still not playing a lot of games through it… but that does not stop me from wanting to fight for the right of such services to exist.
I stream almost all of my games through my laptop from my desktop and I doubt that paradigm is going to change in my household. It allows me to exist with a cheaper laptop and pour any of my finances into my gaming desktop upstairs instead of trying to maintain two rather expensive form factors. With Parsec and an android enabled Chromebook, I can have the same gaming experience that I have on my desktop anywhere inside my house. That is extremely powerful, and what GeForce Now has promised to do is to extend that same flexibility to gamers who either don’t have the skill, patience or knowledge to go through the process of setting the same thing up for themselves. It is really compelling to think that a blah business laptop and $4.95 a month will allow you to purchase games through existing storefronts and play them with RTX enabled graphics.
So yes I get frustrated when Developers be it small indies like the dude behind The Long Dark or big companies like Activision Blizzard and Bethesda take an anti-consumer action and claw their games off of the GeForce Now service. This is the point where I get told that there are business decisions that we are not privy to and that there are complications. I know when you say “no offence but” you are just about to be an asshole… but while I understand the realities of doing business and why sometimes we can’t have nice things… it doesn’t stop me from thinking all of that noise is a lot of bullshit. GeForce Now is not a new platform to deliver games through, it is a hardware surrogate that allows you to play games through existing content delivery vehicles. If you were fine with allowing your players to have the game on Steam or Epic Game Store then you should be fine with them playing it on GeForce Now. In my opinion Developers shouldn’t get a say about it, just like they don’t get to choose the hardware that we purchase.
I hope I successfully rode the line between angry screed and think piece. I am worked up as I sit down and try and finish this because the thought of someone dictating what I do with the games I have valid licenses to always fires me up. I am generally one of the most pro-developer bloggers out there because I do see the ramifications of some of the decisions that are made echoed on the lives of my friends in the industry. This situation however is just a bridge too far for me, and I am unlikely to ever back down from my stance. I will always view the companies that are clawing their games away from GeForce Now in a bad light because I view them as now being on what will ultimately be the wrong side of history. Hardware surrogacy is a thing that is going to happen one way or another and the time of us not having physical hardware in our homes is rapidly approaching. I will always stand on the side of doing this on a manner that benefits the customers.
