Last month, Nvidia’s game streaming service, GeForce Now, came out of beta officially. And since then numerous publishers have pulled their games from the service. Activizion-Blizzard, Bethesda and Hinterland Games have already pulled their titles from the service, and 2K Games has joined them.
The news came yesterday via a short post on Nvidia’s official forums. “Per publisher request, please be advised 2K Games titles will be removed from GeForce NOW today,” explained a representative from Nvidia. They also said they would work with 2K games to get the removed games back on the service in the future.
The full list of games requested by 2K Games to be removed from GeForce Now includes titles like Borderlands, Bioshock Infinite, XCOM 2, Civilisation V and Mafia III.
In 2017, the service expanded to let players stream games to their PC, not unlike what Google Stadia and Microsoft’s XCloud currently offer. The difference with GeForce Now is that players can stream games they already own using the service, which costs $US5 ($8) a month.
But the list of games that work with GeForce Now is getting smaller and smaller as more publishers remove their games from the streaming service.Â
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19 responses to “2K Games Is The Latest Publisher To Remove Its Games From Nvidia’s Streaming Service”
It is actually not like Stadia… And it’s something a lot of these articles and the arguments against it like to blatantly ignore as they pile on.
GeForce Now is the equivalent of remotely using your own PC at home. It’s not a gaming ‘platform’, it is not a gaming store, people don’t buy games on it, they already have to have purchased them.
The service is for remote PC usage and access to more powerful hardware.
Yet now for some insane reason developers and publishers are being applauded for denying precisely what computer people use to play the games THEY ALREADY PAID FOR on? Are you kidding me?
This service is literally being killed because publishers/developers are now making choices of what PC hardware the paying customer is allowed to play their games on… As people go on about how Nvidia is making money off their work. Bullshit. Nvidia are charging for the hardware usage and upkeep of that end.
They already gave you money for your game. Who the fuck are you to decide that the customer isn’t allowed to rent better hardware to play it on?
Nvidia should’ve given them all the middle finger from the start.
i think its because they might have streaming rights with stadia or some sort of agreement.
its new ground – i’m sure they’ll figure it out.
Its not equivalent. It would be if your streaming your home computer to your device… but it’s not and never is your machine (as owner or lease).
The EULA of any game is personal use only, one copy per personal machine.
The EULA expressly forbids commercial use without an appropriate licensing agreement.
Nvidias machines are commercial use, uses code to alter and modify the game to work on their systems and is installing multiple copies/instances of the software. That’s the thing… it may be your game in your mind, but it’s really Nvidias game cause they are installing and running a separate copy for each user. Each instanced copy is $$$
Nvidia knows this, they had commercial licensed agreements for the Beta… at the end their at fault for not clearing this up before going live.
If it really was just a case of Nvidia hiring out Windows VMs with access to high end graphics cards, then it is not clear how Nvidia could prevent customers from playing individual games. The fact that they can indicates that it probably isn’t that simple.
Looking at Nvidia’s quick start guide, it sounds more like a case of using the customer’s Steam account to make decisions on whether to authorise access to Nvidia’s copy of a particular game (possibly modified or configured specially to work with their streaming service).
Without licenses from the publishers that allows public performance of the games, it’s not at all clear what basis Nvidia can provide that service.
That’s an extremely poor summary of what Geforce Now is, it has zero to do with your PC. It connects to your store accounts, and uses the license to play the games you own and streams them from a remote PC to any device Geforce Now supports. So you’re giving your license to a third party, to run on their platform, and stream on multiple devices, which publishers would argue is against the TOU of the original license you bought – which it definitely is. Yes this system exists to extract more money from you to purchase streaming licenses through platforms like Stadia, and you’ll need to buy it again for the streaming platform after that, and again, and again. The license you get when buying a game, physical or digital, is very limited.
Entirely agree. Well said kasterix
Sounds like the usual things developers/publishers are doing now just to take (drain people), of as much money as possible.
I will be most surprised (not really) when we suddenly hear about ActivisionFlix, Bethesda+ and 2K Prime.
Publishers that have previously been shitty continue to be shitty.
More news at 11
Why are you on a gaming news blog if you don’t want to read the gaming news?!
Because Kotaku isn’t really a gaming news blog anymore, it’s broadened a lot since the old days. They even made the “Kotaku-Core” tag for people who just want the gaming news.
You completely misunderstood my intention behind the comment. It wasn’t an attack on Kotaku. It was more a lament on how shitty these companies continue to be.
I have plenty of things i could criticize Kotaku US for, This article aint it chief.
Come on Kotaku / Zach please proof read your articles before posting.
“Acviticions Blizzard” Typo in your first paragraph.
I wasn’t working on the weekend, but I’ve fixed this up now, thanks.
For what it’s worth ‘Nvidia’ is spelled incorrectly multiple times in this article also.
Yeah. Honestly don’t know how that was possible, but OH WELL *fixes*
The funny thing is I’ve seen a few videos testing Geforce Now & it works extremely well. Can’t say the same about Google Stadia though… I’m just waiting until Google eventually abandon Stadia without a word in a few years.
Right?
The fact this one apparently works so well makes the apparent group effort to kill the service through sheer misinformation that much worse.
Thanks for the proof-of-concept Nvidia!