AstroNvidia GeForce Now is putting video ads before play sessions on their free tier
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.
Free user? Even after paying a buttload for the hardware?
GeForce Now is Nvidia cloud service, what do you mean hardware?
Lemmy moment.
Honestly, just make the free service a restricted demo. We don’t need more ads.
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?
RobotZap10000Win the race to the bottom
ISOmorphStandard 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 (that’s called a gate keeper). Then you’re a monopoly and can set the prices as you see fit. Best example of this is uber.
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. Other services like moonlight you have to host yourself.
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?
MomoTimeToDieCostco stopped samples for like barely a month, at least where I was at.
adam_yThe enshittification continues.
Here’s a service that was making money, but we’ve figured we can make more money by interrupting it regularly.
BryceIt’s only being added for the free tier
So far.
How was the free tier making money before ads?
I’m no business genius, but usually free tiers are given away as loss leaders as as part of purchase packages as a way of growing customer base.
Why does Lemmy always provide an obligatory contrarian comment? Is this a free service that they might start putting ads in?
doofer_nameAhh 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
It’s entirely possible that I did not remember Nvidia Now was their cloud gaming service and that my comment was maybe slightly misguided by my own stupidity.
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.
nanoUFOI 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?
Poopfeast420I 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.
KotkingI wanted to try free tier, but amount of time spending to wait in line to play a game was too much.add in that it was laggy and you can't just leave and come back. Now they will get free ad space for people who didn't even try service yet due... Amount of wait time in line. But speaking as someone who is redirected to Russian servers by default (too small country to have local server of course). Wonder how free tier experience for others in "good" countries.
THCDentonFuuuuuck cloud gaming
BlackmistI 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.
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 unreasonable
Wait, 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.
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.
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.
Schlomocucumberstarting 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 👍
I agree with everything you’re saying but also fuck Nvidia.
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
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.
☂️-matter of time before they put ads in the paid tier too.
subscriptions suck.
We’re talking about a gaming streaming platform. How do you think that concept could ever work without a subscription?
And frankly, adds for the free users really isn’t that outrageous or surprising either. I’m mostly surprised that this wasn’t the case from the start.
this is what im saying though.
i said this will be the first point of enshittification on the paid plan, exactly like on movie streaming platforms.
Oh well sorry that I took your “subscriptions suck” literally. I guess what that meant to say was “subscriptions with adds before them suck”. My fault for not figuring this out.
all subscriptions eventually do price hikes and ads.
subscriptions do suck.
And yet they are pretty much non avoidable for certain services. And some of those services are really neat.
My library subscription for example certainly is worth it. So is my public transportation subscription.
neither of those need to be a subscription, but rather a pay as you go model that isnt overpriced.
subscriptions are almost always designed to take MORE money longterm or else they wouldnt be pushing them so hard, on most cases its unavoidable because of how they push it onto us.
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!
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.
Umm…not enshittification. Plenty of reasons to hate on Nvidia this is not one of them.