Nvidia’s cloud gaming service GeForce Now has announced some changes when it comes to subscription plans. Starting today, paid memberships now cost $9.99 per month, or $99.99 per year — they are now called “Priority” memberships.
If you’re an existing “Founders” member, you’ll keep the same subscription price as long as you remain a subscriber. If you stop your subscription at any point, you won’t be able to pay $5 per month again.
Last year, when Nvidia originally introduced paid plans for GeForce Now, the company was pretty transparent with its user base. You could pay $4.99 per month to access the Founders edition, but the company was going to raise the subscription fee at some point. And it sounds like Nvidia has made up its mind and thinks the paid subscription is worth $9.99 per month.
If you’re not familiar with GeForce Now, it lets you start a game on a powerful gaming PC in a data center near you. You get a video stream on your computer, mobile phone, tablet or TV of the game running in a data center — GeForce Now uses a web app on iOS and iPadOS and is available on a limited number of Android TV devices. When you press a button on your controller, the action is relayed to the server so you can interact with the game. All of this happens in tens of milliseconds, making it one of the smoothest cloud gaming experiences available right now.
Compared to Google Stadia and Amazon Luna, Nvidia isn’t starting its own game store. GeForce Now customers launch games they already own. The platform supports Steam, Epic Games, GOG.com and Ubisoft’s launcher.
Game publishers have to opt in to GeForce Now, which means that you can’t launch all your games that you own in your Steam library. Right now, GeForce Now supports around 800 games that you can find on this page.
If you want to try GeForce Now, you can start playing for free. Nvidia offers a free membership that should be considered as a free trial. First, you have to wait in a queue until a free server is available — it can take five, 10 or 15 minutes.
After that, you’re limited to one-hour sessions. When you’ve played for an hour, you’re kicked out of the server. You can still start the game again, but you’ll have to go through the queue one more time.
If you become a paid member, games start nearly instantly and you can play up to six hours at a time. Similarly, you can start the game instantly after your six hours are up. Paid members also get RTX-enabled graphics.
When it comes to specifications, Nvidia has several configurations with different CPUs, graphic cards and RAM. If you play Fortnite, you might not get the best rig as you can get very high graphics on a medium-range PC. But if you launch Cyberpunk 2077, the service tries to prioritize better rigs.
Nvidia says it has attracted nearly 10 million users for its cloud gaming service. It’s unclear how many of them are paying for a subscription.
The company doubled the number of data centers in the last year. There are now more than 20 data centers operated by Nvidia or local partners. The company plans to expand capacity in existing data centers, and add new data centers in Phoenix, Montreal and Australia.
There will be some quality-of-life updates as well, such as the ability to link games with your account to make it easier to launch them and more aggressive preloading of games.
Image Credits: Nvidia
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