Nvidia Sets 100-Hour Monthly Cap on Cloud Gaming Service (nvidia.com) 37
Nvidia will impose a 100-hour monthly limit on its GeForce Now cloud gaming service for new subscribers starting January 2025, with existing members facing the same restriction from 2026, the company said on Thursday.
The gaming giant aims to maintain current subscription prices by implementing the cap, which affects roughly 6% of users. Members can purchase additional 15-hour blocks for $2.99 on Performance tier or $5.99 for Ultimate tier once they exceed the limit.
The service, which allows users to stream games from remote servers, will also rebrand its Priority membership to Performance tier, adding 1440p streaming and ultrawide resolution support. Subscribers can carry over 15 unused hours monthly or switch to basic servers after reaching the cap, Nvidia said.
The gaming giant aims to maintain current subscription prices by implementing the cap, which affects roughly 6% of users. Members can purchase additional 15-hour blocks for $2.99 on Performance tier or $5.99 for Ultimate tier once they exceed the limit.
The service, which allows users to stream games from remote servers, will also rebrand its Priority membership to Performance tier, adding 1440p streaming and ultrawide resolution support. Subscribers can carry over 15 unused hours monthly or switch to basic servers after reaching the cap, Nvidia said.
Just over 3 hours a day (Score:2)
Is not that much, considering they are introducing it for the paid tiers.
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Re:Just over 3 hours a day (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. Two things are always bad for services: caps and meters.
Both make it feel like every hour spent is removing a resource. If its a cap you're using up your allotted usage, and you feel compelled to not use it unless needed. If its metered, then every amount of time you're using it money is trickling away. If its a fixed cost the money is already spend an you're good with that.
Most people who only spend 30 hours per month on the service will dislike a 200 hour cap being there. And most people who might would average $10 on a metered service would probably rather pay $20 for unlimited instead. Even though they're paying more they don't feel like they're running up a bill while using the service.
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It's pretty typical to pause a game and leave it if you are going off to do something else for a little while; rather than fully closing it down and reloading a save(if it even allows saves anywhere) because you need
Re:Just over 3 hours a day (Score:4, Interesting)
As probably the target audience (I was a happy Stadia customer) it seems pretty reasonable to me.
If I was playing that much I'd probably have a gaming PC anyway.
I probably would have joined, but I got a Steam Deck and it's working well enough for me at the moment.
I love (Score:5, Insightful)
How the thin client/fat server model keeps getting rediscovered.
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What do you mean rediscovered? NVIDIA cloud gaming as a service has existed for over 10 years now. You're not being insightful repeating a comment a decade too late. Back in 2013 they even offered dedicated hardware for it.
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1960s and 70s we had dumb terminals running on serial or current loop lines.
1980s had physical X terminals that booted from the network and ran an X session.
1990s had kind of the same thing but with the Sun Ray and Javastation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
See a pattern?
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This isn't just a thin client thing. Gaming can be latency sensitive and lot of things are done in order to hide it from the user.
A lot of the technology and secret sauce in game streaming is trying to achieve low round trip times - with the ideal being able to be faster than an application running locally.
If you can get say, a 16ms round trip time, with the right magic you could ensure you're basically running at speeds close to local, maybe at most 1 frame delayed, but if you can do it right, at near loca
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While I agree with you re: thin clients (that is after all what I do for most of my living - web applications), I disagree in this use case. The amount of traffic that needs to be transferred over the internet for a gaming session of this type is mind boggling. According to their system requirement page [nvidia.com] for 1080p gaming (which sucks, as I've been gaming on 4K for the past 5-6 years) you need 25 Mbps. You say that's not much, and I agree that almost everyone's pipe is thicker than that, but that's the equ
3.5 trillion company (Score:2, Troll)
Re:3.5 trillion company (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:3.5 trillion company (Score:4, Insightful)
You only get to be a 3.5 trillion dollar company by not selling your product at a loss. I just looked up their listing to be sure but apparently I am correct in saying NVIDIA is not a charity and doesn't owe you shit simply because of their valuation.
The old bait and switch. (Score:2)
Get people to use your "service" where they own and control nothing. Wait for them to get used to it. Dramatically increase the price. Profit.
Don't think so (Score:2)
I tested this service a bit years ago, and from what I remember you are literally just paying for the service. You bring your own games by linking in your Steam account (and whatever else they support). There's no bait and switch. You're not "buying" games that will disappear when they shut down. I mean, you could argue that's what Steam is, but that's not what Nvidia are selling here so it's not relevant.
Fair (Score:5, Informative)
Just like other shared services like gyms, people who are using it sparingly are what makes the service profitable. So it makes sense to put limits on the heavy users, but the question is whether or the limit is reasonable. At 100 hours that's about 3 hours a day, then $10/$20 a month is still already a stellar deal. Nvidia gives average gaming for an RTX 4080 at 250 Watts, that's 25 kWh just in power costs, in a high cost power state that's ~$8 is just power alone let alone the amortized cost of the card.
If you're starting to get too far past that mark and the extra costs make it so the economics match the fair price of just owning/running the hardware, then why aren't you just buying your own card anyways rather than needing to wait in queues and have screen lag from internet connection.
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Precisely this. Thank you for the thoughtful post. I guarantee you that when they created this service they knew what it would cost to provide this service per hour, and they knew that some of their customers would probably lose them money. They were OK with this (for a time) because they also knew that these customers would likely be very good evangelists for the service. They might lose money on the heaviest users, but by the time someone spends three hours a day on a service they probably have some g
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Huge tariffs on GPUs and other hardware starting next year.
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Nvidia gives average gaming for an RTX 4080 at 250 Watts, that's 25 kWh just in power costs
No you're assuming the GPU is always running flat out. That's simply not the case. Sure running Cyberpunk with Raytracing and DLSS frame generation gets your room nice and toasty, but my 300Watt GPU doesn't draw 300W for most of the games in my library.
It is a steal in terms of the ability to play games without paying for them, but the power cost for most people wouldn't come into it.
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Steam (Score:2)
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It works pretty well, and you can play from your phone or tablet or laptop or whatever.
GEforce experience also comes with this kind of functionality, so if you have an nvidia card and run Windows, you can stream the vast majority of games to another device.
Re: Steam (Score:2)
Parsec is better than the steam solution and also free (for now anywayâ¦)
Re: Steam (Score:2)
Ah the good ol days of AOL (Score:2)
100 hours! https://imgur.com/a/UVYEwSD [imgur.com]
NVidia GPUs (Score:3)
Designed for training neural networks.
Bought to mine crypto.
Subsidized by gamers.
Re: (Score:2)
How is this insightful? Not only are all three groups of people "subsidising" GPUs at equal cost, but this very service we are discussion is specifically for those people who don't want to buy a fancy GPU but still want fancy graphics.
There's no subsidising here.
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yeah and crypto hasn't been the major sink of GPU resources for a while either.
tbh i was going for funny, but the point is notable: that gamers are not the primary market for GPUs any more, and it's not even close. it makes sense that they'd be nickel-and-dimed now, as a secondary revenue stream. the big $$$ are in "AI"; NVidia was very wise to avoid the crypto boom.
btw: taking slashdot moderation seriously is completely bonkers.
Ok, mum. (Score:2)
Feels like a parent imposing a curfew on a child. Won't work with adults. But then, who on earth would like to stream laggy games in the first place? There's no better experience than bare metal.
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There's no better experience than bare metal.
Build me a bare metal gaming machine for $120 (the cost of the subscription for a year) and don't forget that $120 also needs to budget for games.
As for laggy games, the lag isn't bad. You can play FPS games comfortably on it. I don't recommend joining an e-sports team if your only computer is in the cloud, but if people have no problem playing very time sensitive games on this then you'll be fine.
Or maybe you live in an Amish village and are still receiving IP packets via carrier pigeon in which case I fee
Re: Ok, mum. (Score:2)
Sorry, we don't have electricity here. I had to spend half an hour on an exercise bike to power up the modem and reply to your post.
Buffet (Score:2)
Welcome to the all-you-can-eat buffet, where you can eat as much of anything you want!*
*As long as you're not obese.
This is why this FAILS (Score:2)