This is just peak enshittification at this point.
We anticipate that this change will reduce average wait times for free users over time.
Yes, because huge swaths of people will no longer be using it.
That’s probably the point. They will never make money of people who will never upgrade to a paid membership.
This is just peak enshittification at this point.
It’s a free service, and a game streaming one at that…
I’m the last person to be defending companies but this one really doesn’t sound unreasonableWait, can I game on my old laptop?
Yeah, as long as it can run a modern version of Chrome and can decode video fast enough.
I’m honestly surprised to learn they still offer a free tier, I’m not sure why? What advantage is letting users play for free?
Standard tactic since the early 2000s. Provide a service for next to nothing by dumping insane amounts of cash into it. Competition either can’t hold up or is straight up bought up. Fast forward 5 years and you’re the only real player left. Then you’re a monopoly and can set the prices as you see fit. Best example of this is uber, but amazon and youtube have done it too
There’s really not any competition in the exact same line of business as them anymore. Amazon’s Luna kinda? But not really, you have to buy new copies of games there - or subscribe to them. Other services like moonlight you have to host yourself.
Win the race to the bottom
Same reason drug dealers give out samples
why drug dealers? not really known for their samples except in DARE films. I think Costco would be a better example. are they doing that again btw?
Costco stopped samples for like barely a month, at least where I was at.
So much of the internet is enshittifying abuse of this moronic term enshittify.
It’s fucking free. Youtube had ads before FREE videos forever ago. This isn’t new. This isn’t enshittifying. What an idiotic post.
I agree with everything you’re saying but also fuck Nvidia.
The enshitification discourse on lemmy is fucking nuts. Service goes from you getting a gaming PC completely free, no strings attached except your play session is limited to hour, to the same thing but you see preroll ads while you queue. Any person with more than two braincells could tell it was meant to be a trial for the paid service, but of course people on here are gonna cry because they don’t get free toys anymore.
That’s not the point I was making in the post. I was just showing what was happening with it. I’ve also been a paid subscriber to it on and off; my gripe with it is that it already takes about 5 to 10 minutes to queue into the service (Priority queue for paying ofc), but with this new system it will only start to add you to the queue after you watch the pre-rolls. If it played them while you were stuck in queue, that’d be no big issue to me.
starting March 5, 2024, members will experience up to two minutes of video sponsorship messages before each free gaming session while in queue.
I take that to mean that they are playing the ads while you’re already in que waiting for your session
Ah shit, my reading literacy is terrible. Sorry about that.
Happens to the best of us 👍
Isn’t GeForce Now only available if you buy an Nvidia graphics card? In that case I would consider it part of the product that was sold, not a free software
Ignore my comment, GeForce experience is what I was thinking of.
They did remove GameStream though, which was GFNow but for using from your PC. Or rather GFNow was GameStream but from their PC.
And they took that out, so you couldn’t stream locally any more. And not enough people called them out for that.
You can replace it with Sunshine and Moonlight if you ever find yourself wondering why an nVidia Shield won’t connect to your PC.
I mean sunshine is the same thing as game stream, but better. It uses the same protocol and is much more stable for me.
Yes, but it still sucks that they took out their own implementation, especially when the main selling point of the Shield was streaming games from your PC is decent quality.
It did have a major flaw though, in that it always picked the leftmost monitor, and that’s not what I game on.
Steam Link is clearly a whole lot more joined up in terms of being able to browse and start games, but I’ve never got that to work acceptably either. Runs at about half the framerate of Sunshine, for no reason I can see. No amount of messing with the settings appears to fix it.
Umm…not enshittification. Plenty of reasons to hate on Nvidia this is not one of them.
I used to have the “Founders Edition” subscription tier from when GeForce Now was introduced. It was like 25$/quarter and a limited time offer for the first subscribers of GeForce Now. It was on par with the premium tier (best servers, no time limit, and best quality + ray tracing). Of course, over the years, it got degraded to second best servers, 6 hour session limit, max. 1080p and so on … Then I quit.
I didn’t even know they had a free teir. I could a been playing Fortnite this whole time
Xbox Gaming Pass allows you to play Fortnite for free too. If you have a Samsung TV it’s even easier, just plug the controller on the TV.
Honestly, just make the free service a restricted demo. We don’t need more ads.
I never really got this service, you got to rent hardware but then devs and publishers could tell nvidia that I can’t use my rented hardware to play my bought games?
I think that’s just a concession from Nvidia, and they wouldn’t really have to pull any games from the service.
It’s a far cry better than Google or Amazon making you buy the game on their service specifically.
It’s still cloud gaming. So it still sucks. But at least they’re not trying to force you into a shitty locked in storefront. (Though not keeping your Steam login is definitely a pain point.)
I only went to GfN because Stadia shut down; I think Stadia did it the best way that you probably could tbh.
No they didn’t.
“You have to rebuy your games, that you can’t play anywhere else” isn’t just “not the best way”. It’s straight up horseshit with no possible way to be valid. It’s also the biggest reason it tanked.
The only thing about stadia that was in any way redeemable was the fact that they didn’t mess around and gave full refunds for any game purchase.
Fuuuuuck cloud gaming
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How was the free tier making money before ads?
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It’s only being added for the free tier
So far.
I got an email about that too.
Not sure why because I don’t think I ever got it to work.
It depends on your system, but there’s a desktop and mobile app as well as an unofficial app for Linux.
Can’t you just run a different driver or are all Nvidias bricks now?
These ads are for their game streaming service, not GPU drivers
Thank you!
Free user? Even after paying a buttload for the hardware?
GeForce Now is Nvidia cloud service, what do you mean hardware?
Lemmy moment.
Ahh yes. Another reason to switch sides later this year.
What’s the other side for free cloud gaming?
buy a Nvidia card and host it yourself
