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.
ew! what about families/households with shared computers? what about gametesters, whose job is to play games and find bugs or streamers or game devs? this is absurd! fuck nvidia!
You’re a fucking moron if you buy Nvidia at this point and you deserve everything you lose because of it.
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!
Get Boosteroid instead, even has a winter deal on price at the moment.
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.
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
Absolutely. I play mine during my lunch break at work since I got it a year ago.
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.
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
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.
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
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. “
HA!
Oh look a pricey solution to an issue they made, who would have seen it coming?
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.
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)
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
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.
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
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.
memory prices up, parasites come to feed
The timing is impeccable isn’t it?
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.
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.
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.
and by the looks of it, its gonna start already enshittified.
Cory Doctorow spoke of it in 2011 (transcript here).
You will own nothing and be happy.
I will use old machine until the damn thing quits on me and be happy.
I can’t bring myself to throw anything out anymore. Someday, when all my working PCs have worn out, a $200 bottom of the barrel 32bit netbook could be the last thing standing between me and having to rent compute from some shitty tech company who doesn’t respect my first amendment rights, hides any advanced configuration from the end user, and has an AI constantly rewriting my files to remove any objectionable language, like YouTube or Facebook, but in my home. I’ll hack my toaster to run Linux before I let that happen.
Currently running a ~10 y/o Dell-XPS laptop that still runs absolutely great.
Same, I have a 2011 and 2015 MacBook. And a 2008 iMac and Mac Pro that are about to get Linuxed because the web certs won’t update anymore.
Librewolf has extended the live of the newer machines. But os support is the hardest part.
Have you looked at this?: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/ I used it on my 2015 iMac and it runs the latest OS well.
Where “happy” is a euphemism for something not to be said amongst mixed company.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Haaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
I wish I could find the people on Reddit that called me a lunatic when I said subscription services always enshitify, NO MATTER WHAT. It’s a matter of when, not if.
Do you think Dropout will enshitify? It’s one of the best streaming services, and tons of people on the fediverse say it’s the only subscription they have. They raised their prices last year by $1, but let people keep their old price if they stay subscribed.
Is it a non-profit? No? It will enshitify.
And this is combined with cutting Blackwell production by 40% and exacerbating a market already dominated by scalpers and AI data centers. Everything is getting enshittified, subscription just one component of it.
I’ve always held out for PCMR but these companies are making it near impossible - or just prohibitively expensive - to be a PC gamer.
and they just dropped support for pascal :/
Like every comment like yours that I have ever seen, I would bet money you didn’t quite say what you are claiming to say here, didn’t say it in a way that would imply the same thing, and didn’t get quite the reaction you are saying you got.
Found the subscriber.
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?
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.
