GeForce Now's Paid Subscription is Doubling in Price

Nvidia is effectively doubling the price of GeForce Now, its cloud streaming service. The company will add a new subscription tier on Thursday called Priority membership, which will cost $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, Nvidia announced in a blog post. From a report: GeForce Now allows people to play PC games that they already own via cloud streaming. The games themselves are hosted on Nvidia's servers, then streamed to the player on devices of all kinds, such as computers, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and browsers. Players can stream games they own on platforms like Steam, the Epic Games Store, Battle.net, and Uplay -- as long as GeForce Now supports the games in question. Before Thursday's membership changes, Nvidia offered two options for GeForce Now users. The free tier only required an Nvidia account, but limited playtime to one-hour sessions. The Founders tier, which cost $4.99 per month or $24.99 for six months, provided players with "priority access" to cloud servers, sessions of up to six hours, and ray-traced graphics. The new Priority membership will take the place of the Founders option. Priority members will get the same features as Founders for the new twice-as-high price. This new membership option will open sometime on Thursday.

6 months from now...

[Anonymous Coward]

6 months from now, nVidia announces the shuttering of its cloud streaming service due to poor user uptake. Their CMO will say that they just can't figure out why nobody wanted to use it.

Re:

[tysonedwards]

The issue I’ve had with GeForce Now is the removal of games.

Re: 6 months from now...

[Armonk]

less is more and now they are charging you more for less

Re:

[fazig]

In this case they might be knowing what they're doing.

Because of the graphics card supply issues, it's plausible that a larger number of people has been flocking to such cloud services just in order to be able to experience high end graphics. So nVidia does what most corporations would do if demand increases, rise the prices and see how far that can go.

they need cards to power the servers as well

[Joe_Dragon]

they need cards to power the servers as well and the chip cost may hurt them as well.

Re:

[fazig]

I would assume so. So what does the market do if demand outgrows supply?

Re:

[tlhIngan]

they need cards to power the servers as well and the chip cost may hurt them as well.

I would presume that if they have to provision another 1000 servers, they simply get the necessary chips in-house. After all, they make the things so if they need some for internal sales, they can pull it from internal stock.

I can't imagine the GeForce Now team being told "Sorry, buy your cards from eBay like everyone else does".

Re:

[lp_bugman]

Because they are the manufacturers of the GPU's They can use GPUs that don't pass QC and so they are free for them, They get used in their Cloud business instead of getting marked for the dumpster.

Re:

[MrL0G1C]

Maybe they're making more money mining Etherium than they are from gamers.

Seems to be a trend...

[QuietLagoon]

... once the customers are hooked on the service, start raising the low introductory price. But doubling it? That just looks like greed.

Re:

[olsmeister]

I would feel like a doofus if I forked out $100 a year for a service someone else just payed half of that a month ago.

Re:

[larryjoe]

... once the customers are hooked on the service, start raising the low introductory price. But doubling it? That just looks like greed.

Current customers are grandfathered in. It's the new customers that pay the higher price.

Re:

[Jemm]

Microsoft did this with the XBox Pass for PCs.

Not as much of a change as you might think

[Xylantiel]

It was $8/month when it was only available on NVIDIA devices, before the current wide availability. So not exactly a big hike. Though admittedly that came with some free games. I think "founder's" was a pretty clear indication that the $5 price point was not final. My bigger complaint is that they seem to low-ball some of the default graphics settings.

Unavailability

[GrahamJ]

Continuing nvidia's trend of things called Founders being impossible to buy.

FYI current Founders

[oh-dark-thirty]

can keep the $5 rate as long as they subscribed.

What are the restrictions?

[guruevi]

If I can play a game, can I submit a game to steam that mines Bitcoin? $10 isn't too bad for a month worth of mining on what I assume must be some beefy GPU.

Re:

[iamhassi]

If I can play a game, can I submit a game to steam that mines Bitcoin? $10 isn't too bad for a month worth of mining on what I assume must be some beefy GPU.

Even if you can, do they let you run MSI Afterburner so you can increase the memory speed and decrease cpu speed?

Deleting account in 5...4...3...

[jddj]

This was pretty cool in beta, before the service refused to run any of the games I own. If all I can run is the Steam store, why would I pay a cent?

Re:

[kingrat]

This is not true, It also connects to Epic Games store, as well as other game companies directly.

Re: Deleting account in 5...4...3...

[jddj]

Sorry, it _is_ true that I can run nothing else: I don't own anything from these other companies

Cloud gaming is a market failure

[arosenfield]

It's a solution in search of a problem. The market doesn't want it, and raising prices won't help.

What?

[ledow]

"GeForce Now allows people to play PC games that they already own via cloud streaming. Players can stream games they own on platforms like Steam"

Is it just me, or does Steam not let you stream any Steam game you own from anywhere, anyway? There's literally an Android Steam app to do exactly that.

What a crappy business model.

i noticed

[KingBenny]

they hiped the 3000 series, set a REALLY attractive price, made a small batch for the youtubers to push their stock up on hot air and then delivered nothing to the plebs and doubled the prices of the gpu's as well - it must be american ...

21st century arcade

[kmoser]

This is just like playing arcade games in the 1980s, except instead of feeding quarters into a cabinet you're paying the owner $10/month to play with a machine that isn't yours.