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.
I agree with this article 100%. I actually bought games from steam because I could play them on the service. Now that’s been taken from me and I can’t play the games I paid licenses for. The developers are just greedy, period, full stop.
While I empathize with you as an end user who was playing specific games that got yanked from the GeForce Now service, as a friend in the industry I’m going to have to disagree with you here for primarily one reason: who gets blamed when a game runs poorly over streaming.
Similar to Stadia, not every game is going to feel good or perform well when streamed from a server. However, is the platform going to get blamed for that, or the game maker? If I built a game, and someone decided to play it over Remote Desktop (something which is very much not optimized for games), I’d probably tell the user, sorry, but Remote Desktop isn’t usable for games, and I could probably get away with that because it’s not in the use case of the RDP service/protocol.
However, because GeForce Now is a streaming service built specifically for games, that line of argument for the average player goes out the window. It is built specifically for games! But not every game is going to play well under those conditions, and so users are going to complain about input latency, among other things, and rightfully so. But unlike Stadia, Nvidia didn’t ask, they just unitlaterally signed every game up and if you’re on a platform, you damn well need to support that platform.
It’s a similar reason to why we didn’t support Linux for Eon Altar. Sure, we could’ve cross compiled it, released it, and called it a day, but it’d run like molasses. I don’t feel comfortable as a developer releasing it on that platform if I can’t guarantee a certain quality of play.
So it’s a choice between spending a bunch of money to ensure that your game is up to snuff on that service—assuming it’s possible, given a number of companies aren’t even looking at Stadia because it’s not a good fit—or opting out of a service you wouldn’t have agreed to in the first place. And if you just let it be and it plays like poop, your product reviews on Steam are going to be the ones that get downvoted and negative reviews, not GeForce Now’s.
For me personally I don’t see owning and playing on my own hardware go away anytime soon. I just like my hardware.
That being said, I’m with you on this. It’s not a gaming platform (or at least not a game-providing platform), so it shouldn’t be treated like one.
Bel, thanks for the explanation because (lack of an Nvidia card) I obviously didn’t try it out – that’s really interesting, I had thought it was local.
But… I don’t think it changes anything regarding my point 🙂 They’re probably not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, it’s a company after all. So either they made a calculation that not enough people will use up enough resources that they won’t have a margin on this (despite the 5 bucks) or they’re seeing this as some sort of awesome marketing ploy to get more people to buy Nvidia cards. I am really bad with money things and I can’t even imagine how to budget and run such an operation (in contrast to the tech) – but I am still very certain they have a monetary or at least marketing/customer-wooing plan. And that’s looping back to what I saw. I refuse the notion that this is simply a net win for customers, Nvidia has some motive in this (not saying it’s a bad one per se), if only to be able to say “look what AMD can’t do” and that’s where the studios (especially the indies) are instrumentalized to a degree. Doesn’t make it less sucky for the consumers.
@nogamara — I think you are confusing 2 services.
Nvidia GameStream lets you stream from your own Nvidia GPU-equipped PC to a device. Yes you need an Nvidia card for that.
GeForce Now doesn’t require you to own an Nvidia card. You could absolutely go and try the free tier and play on an AMD equipped system (or a machine without a discrete graphics card, like a work-provided laptop), or an Android phone, for that matter.
Of course this is a business and GeForce is selling a service: a virtual PC. Instead of spending $1500 building a gaming PC, you spend $5/month to have a virtual PC.
You don’t get any games for that $5/month. If you want to use GeForce Now, you have to go out and buy games from Steam or Epic or Uplay. Essentially what GeForce Now does is broaden the market and tear down that $1500 barrier to getting started as a PC gamer.
It is crazy to me that GFN is saying “OK instead of 1 million PC Gaming System owners, now your potential customer base is 50 million people who own a non-gaming PC, or a Mac, or an Android tablet.” [I’m making those numbers up, but clearly the pool is significantly bigger.] And developers are saying “No” to that? Crazy.
I am absolutely baffled that anyone would be on the developer’s side in this. Nvidea Now is not Netflix, you are not giving Nvidea any money at all for content. If you don’t own a game on Steam already, you can’t play it by linking your steam account to their service. You literally cannot play the game unless you give the publisher money for it before hand. How is the publisher not getting their cut in this scenario? What on earth is ambiguous about it?
I should say upfront that I completely agree with your point of view on the principle of this, Bel. I’m just not sure that the practicalities – and particular the legalities – are as simple as you suggest.
When we used to go down to the game store and buy games in a box and bring them home and install them on a device we owned things were fairly clear. You owned both the software and the hardware and could pretty much do what you liked. Once games moved to digital format and online distribution that clarity disappeared. There was a lot of talk about all this when the issue of whether you could sell “used” digital games arose and also on whether you could leave your digital games (and music and video and all the other digital wares) to someone in your will.
I’m not sure whether any of that has been codified yet and even if it has it will vary from legislature to legislature. The general feeling, I think, has been that we rent our digital goods; we don’t own them. If you dig into it you usually find that what you’ve paid for is a limited license to access the software under a specified set of circumstances. If developers haven’t already moved to restrict that so as to block use on hardware or platforms they don’t want you to access (without paying them) then they soon will.
Then it’s going to be down to courts to decide if that stands up and most legal systems around the world are probably barely beginning to come to terms with technology as it was in the 1990s so it will be a long time before anything is really clear on who owns what. In the meantime it’s going to be a game of chicken to see who blinks first and/or the usual “deepest pockets wins” I’ll see you in court bluff and counter bluff.
Nvidia are in a tough position. If the big software houses really wanted to play hardball they could actually start to release their games in a form that doesn’t work on Nvidia GPUs. That would be a scorched earth policy for the developers though and it’s hard to iomagine it happening. Not hard to imagine them threatening it, though.
As you say, it’s an idea whose time has come and it will happen – eventually. Expect an awful lot of posturing and saber-rattling before it settles down. though. And when the dust settles, expect it to be less good and more expensive than it could have been.
“I have a weird use case namely because I game from two different locations in my house. ”
No, that’s not at all weird. A lot of people have situations like this. Or they travel a lot. Think about all the kids with divorced parents who spend weekends with the other parent.
The ONLY thing I can imagine, from people who argue with you, is that people just do not really understand what GeForce Now is.
Because following along with this path that devs/publishers are going down now, we’ll start seeing publishers say “We don’t want our games on Nvidia GPUs anymore.” Because that’s what they’re saying now: “We want to limit which hardware customers can run our games on.” Because GeForce Now is just virtual hardware.
It’s stupid and I, too, am angry about it. Hell, no lie, I own The Long Dark on Steam and was thinking I should start playing it on GeForce Now.
And you think WE are mad? Check out the GFN Reddit and listen to people who don’t own gaming machines but bought games on Steam to play through GeForce Now… and now they can’t play them because they were pulled!
Having your game on steam or epic (as a developer) = you getting part of the money from that, where as this GeForce thing has a fee that users are paying, but the developers of the games that are being played through it don’t see any of that money. If users added their own games to it (like you can add non-steam games to steam) or if it didn’t have a fee, I wonder if we’d be seeing the same issues.
So the thing is… the developer is STILL getting their cut from Steam or Epic Game Store. You still have to purchase the game through a platform in order to be able to play it on GeForce Now. All Nvidia is charging for is access to the hardware. You can play for free for up to an hour at a time or if you pay for a subscription you get 6 hour long sessions and RTX hardware. No money is being exchanged for software, that is all happening between you and your storefront accounts. When I connect I have to log into Steam as me from the remote GeForce Now session and I see the games in MY library, not something Nvidia is providing for me.
On the one hand I’m mostly on the consumer side, yeah. I bought the game once, now let me play it however I want.
But I actually agree with the point that Nvidia is offering some kind of service that enables this and it is insofar different as you (as a developer) know about the Steam streaming thing beforehand and accept it as part of the deal (on Steam) – also I’m not 100% enlightened about the details, so I suppose you can use a bigger variety of games via GFN than via Steam alone?
So yeah, I get that developers want to make their money back for a port to platform X, but I am absolutely not a person to buy a game twice. But I do think it’s fair if they forbid Nvidia to have their games there as long as Nvidia takes money for that service – I don’t care for what exactly they take money. If it was free I’d absolutely suggest developers to allow it. And no, maybe that doesn’t make sense 😛
But that service basically amounts to that of an internet provider. This would be like Netflix saying “I’m sorry, you can’t watch netflix on cableone because cableone isn’t paying us a cut of their fees”.
I feel like maybe I am still not explaining it well enough. I deal with virtual servers and desktop virtualization on a daily basis so this is all super common place for me in my work. Taking a longer trip back for a second. What we think of as a “server” these days rarely is actually a self contained box like the one you have on your desktop. It is a stack of processing power, memory and storage that is pooled together and given a name, and then has an operating system stored on it. The physical enclosure itself contains hundreds if not thousands of things we think of as a finite system. So familiarity with this sort of thing… I grasped what GeForce Now was doing pretty quickly. There is a physical client that is installed to your computer, and this more or less is a glorified remote desktop client. It is translating your physical inputs and sending them across the wire to a virtual server that is actually doing the work and rendering the game for you to see.
When you fire up GeForce Now and select a game, you are not actually launching that game. You are connecting to a virtual machine that has the steam client installed on it and has had your steam authentication passed through to it. Then you navigate the familiar steam interface and choose the game you want to play and click install. This asks you where you want to install your game and you are only given the option of the C Drive. This isn’t YOUR C Drive, but instead the only volume mounted to the virtual machine you are connecting to. The game installs nearly instantly because I am certain they are running a Steam Cache server, which admittedly is something anyone can set up and run on their network if they have lots of people installing steam games on a regular basis. Example here: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/building-a-local-steam-caching-server-to-ease-the-bandwidth-blues/
When you click play you are executing the game you own from steam on a virtual machine that was created for you in server room somewhere, and then the images being rendered are streamed back to your client through again the glorified remote desktop program. When you exit the game the virtual machine is shut down and you are returned to the default interface of the GeForce Now remote desktop client for you to choose another game… which starts the process all over again. Each game you launch is creating a new virtual server, transferring your session over to it and letting you play the game… and again when you exit the box is destroyed so that the capacity can be returned to the virtual environment for someone else to play games on. It is a constant cycle of creating a new machine, installing a game through the steam client logged in with your account… playing the game and then destroying the machine.