this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024

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119

NVIDIA GeForce Now gets pre-roll ads for free users (www.engadget.com)

submitted 2 years ago by schizoidman@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

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[–] Heavybell@lemmy.world 37 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Huh, didn't expect geforce now to have a free tier.

[–] WolfLink@lemmy.ml 24 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It’s always had a free tier. The free tier existed before the paid tier did.

[–] albert@lemmy.sysctl.io 12 points 2 years ago (3 children)

And tbh it's always been pretty decent. You can access (almost) your entire Steam library.

[+] circuitfarmer@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Remember Stadia? GeForce Now is what it should've been. It's a cloud gaming platform, but you bring your own games.

[+] circuitfarmer@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

The game is rendered remotely and broadcast to one or multiple clients that display the output and handle the input. The network introduces a massive round-trip (input -> network -> remote -> network -> display) latency compared to running the game locally, so it's only really viable for most games where the internet infrastructure allows it (so Australia and much of Europe are out). The advantage is that the remote VM can be significantly more powerful than a local machine.

The early service was both an experiment/development version and a loss leader to get people to join the service in the first place. Price hikes and free service degradation were planned and inevitable.

[–] pixelscript@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It amazes me how every time a for-profit company that provided a free service goes mask-off and starts aggressively monetizing it so many people put on a shocked Pikachu face.

This is exactly how this works, people! The free shit is always bait to draw you in and get you invested. The trap was designed from the start to snap shut once there was enough of you in it. They fully intend to not just extract value from you to run the service, but also to retroactively pay for all the free shit they gave you. It was always a loan. An investment.

Oh, sure, you can always be sly by taking the free shit and ditching once monetization comes over the horizon. But do so knowing that every time you need to do this is the rule, not the exception. Companies aren't suddenly slighting you one by one out of the blue, it was always the strategy from the beginning for all of them.

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

but also to retroactively pay for all the free shit they gave you

How would they do that?

[–] pixelscript@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

Making more money back than they paid.

[–] XTornado@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yeah... The only good thing of offering free tier is to fill gaps of unused machines during low usage hours, as they otherwise have the machines unused. Of course it only makes sense if that makes you money, like people testing it that eventually subscribe, having ads on it or similar.

[–] WolfLink@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If you can’t run the game you want to play locally, you might be able to run it on GFN and stream it instead.

If you have a reasonably powerful computer and the games you play work on Linux, you are much better off just running the games locally.

[–] yamanii@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

60 minutes of play is not pretty decent at all, the free tier is just to test if it works since there's a queue time too.

[–] vox@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 years ago

also the queue used to be 5 minutes tops, now it's 40-60 minutes long

[–] XTornado@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Well... Let me tell you some people doesn't have that much time to game at once...specially the ones that didn't get a gaming computer or console which this would benefit.

On the other hand I guess the free tier has queues so not sure if it would help for those.

[–] yamanii@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

I know, I tried it, and had to wait half an hour for a spot right after lunch time, the queue for the prime time gaming hours of 18 to 22 must be even longer.

[–] WolfLink@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

It used to be good enough that I would rely on it over dual-booting my laptop. But at least to me it’s only a last resort now.

They’ve limited which games you can play, added tighter time restrictions, added a long wait to even start playing, and now ads.

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 16 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I mean, it is a free product. This doesn't bother me too much. Eventually they have to make money to stay in business as much as I despise Nvidia.

It would be a completely different story if I was paying for it.

[–] geekwithsoul@lemm.ee 10 points 2 years ago

I agree that as a free product, the ads are less loathsome. But from a company that just posted a 265% increase in revenue, it’s not like they’re worried about keeping the lights on https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/21/nvidia-nvda-earnings-report-q4-2024.html

[–] tabular@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Nvidia is making plenty of money. This is about having power of their user's computing.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev -2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

A free product you pay for when you buy your graphics card?

Edit: oooh, I completely mistook the products. nvm

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