I'm both bullish and bearish on cloud gaming, if that makes sense. I have Stadia, and the tech is really nice, but as pointed out, there are no games. Further, you have to buy/rebuy all your games just for Stadia, which may not exist soon(ish).
Then there's Geforce Now. Their system is simply awesome, with similar tech but two key advantages. First, you can use any controller, which is a big win. But biggest of all, most of the games are just via Steam. So buy it once, play on PC or ShieldTV, your choice. This was, as it turns out, too good to be true. In the last month, at least two huge publishers pulled out, essentially disabling the ability to play a purchased Steam game via Geforce Now. Now their fate is looking questionable as well.
One month ago, I would have said Geforce Now is absolutely the way to go. Today, I'd tell anyone curious just to wait and see what happens this year.
> Then there's Geforce Now. Their system is simply awesome, with similar tech but two key advantages. First, you can use any controller, which is a big win.
There's a common misconception that because Stadia has its own controller and because playing Stadia through Chromecast requires that controller (because Chromecast has no Bluetooth so the only way to connect would be something like a wifi controller like the Stadia Controller) that you cannot use other controllers to play Stadia, that's incorrect.
As Microsoft control the firmware on the Xbox controller, and Sony the dualshock.
Wifi controller is a bit of a dead concept, so I would understand not supporting that, but the bluetooth functionality of steam controllers works just like any other bluetooth controller by exposing a HID to the host.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I'm a stay at home, couch player. So the only method of playing for me is via the Chromecast, which only supports the Stadia controller. The controller is decent, but the battery life is not up to snuff with the Nvidia or Xbone ones.
Give it 5 years and xbox and playstation will have their equivalent cloud offerings, but far more refined and with their expansive and ever growing catalogs. The players in the market now are doomed, but at least it can be assured the industry giants pick up the pieces from when google inevitably cancels this project and make a better product like they tend to do.
It will never overtake having a local device which you can play games on, and people that think so are delusional or are trying to sell you something on subscription.
There will be people streaming the games they are playing, there will be people playing streaming games, but it won't ever overtake playing on a local device. (I include handheld consoles, phones, consoles, PCs in this).
As a counter point to GeForce now and cloud gaming in general. I splurged on a shield tv 2 (maybe 3?) years ago and it was a configuration nightmare, especially to play your own games with. Getting controllers to do the right thing was horrendous, especially when you have young kids waiting for you to finish setting it up.
Definitely planning to be a late (real late) adopter of this tech in the future.
The Shield gathers dust while the Switch sees a ton of action.
I checked my receipts (email, easy to find). I purchased the ShieldTV in December of 2016. So just over 3 years ago. GeForce Now launched in October of 2015, but maybe just for Shield TV owners? Apparently they did a relaunch in 2020... not sure what that means. Better I guess?
You're both right, kinda. Geforce Now was in a ..closed-ish beta (you could get in, but they made it seem exclusive) for years. I honestly don't remember if it was called that when it launched. The polished product is what recently 'launched', and configuration is super simple. In fact, it was the xbox controller's instructions I had to turn to to figure out how to put it in bluetooth detection mode.
I picked up my first ever games console this year, and got upsold a few months of Microsoft's Game Pass with it, and it's gold: Netflix for gaming, across two of the major platforms (Windows and Xbox). Much like Netflix there's more stuff there than I know what to do with; from my perspective, it makes it harder to see what the value of Stadia is, exactly. Especially when an Xbox One S is about the price of the Stadia starter package these days, and I can stream games from Windows or an Xbox as well.
n=1, but my video card got stuck at 405MHz last week, and I've been using Geforce Now to play World of Tanks while I wait for the replacement to arrive. The performance is shockingly good. The latency just hasn't been an issue, which is something I am genuinely surprised by.
The great thing about GeForce Now is that it's a great proof of value. I don't know whether it will succeed because the politics of it have to make sense. But the tech is there. On wifi it is 95% of the time good, with 5% stutter, which sucks. On ethernet the reviews are that it's perfect, I haven't tried it yet, but the reviews are great.
Unfortunately the library is not great yet. Not bad either, but I'm missing some favs. Plus while most people play a few popular titles, most people also have an obscure title only they play. And you can't run those, which keeps me going back to wanting to run my own hardware.
People speculate 'the money', and I have to agree. This isn't a tech problem, as in, it was working last month, and gone this month. Basically, what incentive is there to let people play what they already own, when you can charge them for their 10th copy of Skyrim for Geforce. To name and shame, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard. Ubisoft is pretty nearly keeping it alive at this point.
According to one of the authors of The Long Dark, which has also been pulled, it's because NVidia didn't bother asking, they just... put it online (source: https://twitter.com/RaphLife/status/1234181315840229376). Apparently they offered a graphics card by way of compensation, so...
Do you disagree? Why do they need permission? You own the game on Steam, or buy it on Steam, and they just give you a VM to play it on. I don't need their permission to get a new computer, do I?
I'm not invested one way or another, and I certainly don't know what the legal position is. It does, however, suggest that Nvidia are rather vulnerable to any one of Microsoft, Steam, or game dev/publishers putting them under the microscope.
GeForce now has too much friction to launch a game right now. It has to spawn this weird stripped down windows shell, where you then have to log in to steam (my steam password is cumbersome to type, because I use strong passwords and a password manager, and copy/paste doesn't seem to work between my desktop and the vm), and then you have to launch your game. This whole process takes about 5 minutes.
At least via shield tv, typing is the absolute worst, I agree. However, I've only had to log in to steam once, now it just does it behind the scenes. It's actually kinda hacky, you can see it launch Steam, launch the window, then maximize. That said, it only takes about 5 seconds to launch a game this way.
Then there's Geforce Now. Their system is simply awesome, with similar tech but two key advantages. First, you can use any controller, which is a big win. But biggest of all, most of the games are just via Steam. So buy it once, play on PC or ShieldTV, your choice. This was, as it turns out, too good to be true. In the last month, at least two huge publishers pulled out, essentially disabling the ability to play a purchased Steam game via Geforce Now. Now their fate is looking questionable as well.
One month ago, I would have said Geforce Now is absolutely the way to go. Today, I'd tell anyone curious just to wait and see what happens this year.