Nvidia’s latest entry into the Cloud Gaming industry has seen a rather uphill task of getting developers to stay on the platform after the service went public in February. Soon after the release of GeForce Now to the public, many big Studios and Publishers decided to withdraw their games and full libraries from the platform citing Licensing issues.
Nvidia released a statement when Activision-Blizzard withdrew from the program:
“Activision Blizzard has been a fantastic partner during the GeForce Now beta, which we took to include the free trial period for our founder’s membership. Recognizing the misunderstanding, we removed the games from our service, with the hope we can work with them to re-enable these, and more, in the future.”
The misunderstanding that Nvidia is talking about has to do with the licensing issues. According to a report from Bloomberg, Activision Blizzard wanted to negotiate a new commercial agreement before Nvidia could serve up the games, and Nvidia has been pretty clear that its business model is to not have commercial agreements with game publishers.
Games of several developers such as Activision- Blizzard, Bethesda, Capcom, Konami, Rockstar, Square Enix, etc aren’t available on the platform. This includes several big games such as GTA:V, WoW, Call Of Duty series, Tomb Raider, PES, Monster Hunter World, Street Fighter, etc.
Nvidia’s GeForce Now is a direct competitor to Google’s Stadia, but fundamentally Nvidia’s implementation of Cloud gaming is rather different as it is more straight forward than Stadia. Basically GeForce Now is a Virtual PC with Nvidia hardware available over the cloud on which users are able to install any game they own license to from their favorite game store and doesn’t need direct support or port from developers.
Unlike Stadia which works on a totally different platform and needs direct support from developers/publishers to port the game over. In Stadia, the user also needs to buy the license for the game they want to play from the limited number of games currently available on the platform.
When compared to Stadia, GeForce Now is more popular amongst the general consumer as the service is simple to use and includes a variety of games. Plus, GeForce Now has a free-tier and supports a number of devices which also includes a large number of Mobile Devices something that Stadia still struggles with. Since mobile gaming is one of the biggest markets and as big as both the PC and Console market combined.
