So a few days ago, we started hearing game developers remove their games from Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service. Many found it odd since Nvidia isn’t necessarily profiting off these games directly, but instead offers a way for players to play their already established library of games from Steam. So why the sudden pullback?
So far Activision Blizzard and Bethesda have pulled their games from GeForce Now, and now recently Raphael van Lierop, the game director and writer of indie hit The Long Dark followed suit. Now, with Activision and Bethesda, their reasoning was unclear, however, after Raphael van Lierop pulled his game out and gave this vague reasoning for his decision, there’s only one reason I could think of that kinda makes sense.
All these developers have looked at Nvidia Geforce Now and have found no way to profit off their games being on that platform long term. It’s not greed or anti-consumer, it’s business.
When I think about it, it kinda makes sense. Nvidia is only charging players $5 a month for the streaming service aspect, you’re not paying for the game but rather the means to play the game on any device you want.
This puts a damper on the possibility of reselling the games on different platforms. If you bought the game on Steam, why buy it again on another device when you could just stream it with Nvidia Geforce Now?
From that point of view, you could begin to understand why the devs of these games had to reevaluate this new technology. It could cost them millions of potential revenue in the foreseeable future. From a consumer point of view, it stinks and looks greedy yeah, but from a business point of view, it’s not sustainable in the long run, especially with the cost of making games getting more and more expensive.
I can’t fault them for thinking like that if that were to be the case. Plus a digital game is a license to use a virtual good, you don’t technically own the game. So another argument that could be made is that Nvidia never had the right to use Steam to get the license to those games. We live in a different time guys, it’s not all black and white. A lot of angles have to be considered.
Nvidia GeForce Now could work, they just need to split a percentage of their profit to the developers for hosting their intellectual property, which will likely raise their price up, something that I don’t think Nvidia would be too happy to do.
