Comment by littlecranky67
5 hours ago
GeforceNow is actually a weird service - you don't only rent the GPU. Nvidia needs to have a licensing deal with the game publisher you want to play (the game you already own). They removed quite a lot of games, because big names like ActivisionBlizzard, 2K and Bethesda withdrew licensing agreements. If I only rent hardware, I don't think I need permission by the IP holder whose software I intend to run there.
Why would companies withdraw licensing agreements? They get money from Nvidia and also from the consumer that has to buy the game separately.
They certainly aren't launching it on a different game-streaming service or intending to compete with it. Withdrawing doesn't make customers buy more of their games either - probably less.
So why would they be withdrawing from licensing agreements that are effectively free money for them?
Game streaming services like that are harder to reliably hardware fingerprint and introduces unusual install patterns (same game potentially repeatedly installed large amount of times by same user).
For DRM and ban avoidance detection this means either false positives (which is bad rep) or if it's tuned to ignore those signals on specific service provider hardware makes it easier to do account sharing (and thus not buying the game).
I always assumed that the streaming services had negotiated to receive DRM-free versions specifically to avoid this issue, similar to the DRM/telemetry-free versions of Windows used on air-gapped government networks.
if we've learned anything from movie and show streaming then yes, publishers will absolutely all start their own game streaming service if it ever takes off. nice that Microsoft is building a gaming monopoly, can't have multiple platforms if there's only one mega-publisher.
Studios that gets purchased by these mega-publishers have always experienced enshittification, so the fact that they might make their slop streaming-only doesn't really bother me.
We'll be fine as long as we have an open platform to play good games from studios that haven't sold out, and without interference of anti-competitive gatekeepers, but we need to defend our right to use these open platforms - definitely the PC, and if we could find a way to align, I think we could regain ground on android/ios as well.
>> Why would companies withdraw licensing agreements? They get money from Nvidia
Lawyer reasons: Because they have lost the rights themselves. They may have licensed things like artwork/music for sale during a fixed period and so ongoing subscriptions, continual resales, would require renewing those licenses. Just look at the recent re-release of Mike Tyson's Punch Out, which had to remove Mike Tyson.
Evil reasons: They want to publish a new version of a game, say SimCity 11. The target audience is largely people already playing SimCity 10. So they discontinue SimCity 10, turn it off, to "encourage" the customer base to forget SimCity 10 and "purchase" SimCity 11.
Petty rich guy personal reasons: Say you are George Lucas and you have published something embarrassingly awful, like a Star Wars Christmas Special. The die-hard fans love it, or at least want to see it. But you are embarrassed. So you discontinue any concept of streaming/rental/sales to hide your shame, regardless of profit motivations. Also, Han shot first!
They weren't getting money from nvidia, and really why should they? nvidia provides very expensive hardware on which I can access my own steam library, etc.
The world of IP isn't just about selling someone something, it's about reselling the same person that thing many times over. So now I have my VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, digital streaming, 4K digital streaming, 4K digital streaming HD collectors edition, etc. variants.
And of course if there are multiple cloud gaming providers, they see it as an opportunity to extort each of them.
When GFN first came out it had all of the Civilization games -- and it worked great -- but then as other cloud gaming options appeared 2K pulled the whole catalog, presumably with hand out. When Civ VII came out they suddenly allowed it all again, not only to rekindle interest in the series and presumably because some people were only going to buy the game if they could play it on the platform.
It sounds exactly how netcafes operate where the public can lease a computer and play games for a few hours. I don't think it's weird they have to get special licenses just like netcafes do.
(Source: owned and ran a netcafe for 10 years)
Just a correction: Netcafes don't have to get special licences. I'm not aware of any such licences existing anymore. They just buy however many standard retail copies or online accounts they want. Sometimes a publisher will see the marketing value and will provide some copies/licences at no charge.
Going back 15-20 years or so, Valve used to run a "Cybercafe Program" that was a large monthly expense for cybercafes, but shut it down after a while because it wasn't worth the cost of administration. Now cybercafes buy Steam accounts same as any end user. Asking any publisher for a cybercafe or "commercial exploitation" licence always invoked the response "Um - no idea?" from any department you asked, coupled with "We're afraid to suggest anything" from the legal department and "just use standard copies I suppose?" from the marketing department.
Do you need to have purchased the game at those cafes? Cause you do at geforce now. Game publishers who withdrew from geforce now are just greedy.
There are a few models.
- They have majority of popular games already installed but you need to log in to your own steam account and only have access to the games you already own.
- They provide an in-house account and offer games available in that account to be played. This is usually for cafes offering playtime for console games.
- Partnerships with games studios/publishers, but really I only know about this in Korean PC Bangs for specific games where some content is locked. For example in League of Legends, you unlock playable characters over the course of playing the game so a low level account might not have the full roster unlocked. If you log in your account to affiliated PC Bangs, you have all characters unlocked while playing there.
Well it is bad user experience. While GeforceNow allos me to connect my steam and epic account, the list of games actually playable is not my collection there, but the subset of games nvidia has a licensing deal (a lot less). Also they are free to remove support for games - as happened when big players withdrew their licensing.
I've seen tech videos from LTT and alike where they build remote gaming rigs using windows Hyper-V with GPU passthrough to the guest - that is essetially what they should do, and let me rent a virtual machine with hardware support and low latency video compression. I don't see a reason you would need any licensing deals there.
That is very different, because the netcafe own those games. This would be like needing to rent the computer at the cafe, bringing your own purchased game, but then the netcafe also needs a license to allow you to play your own games at the computer.