Makes sense. They need to save some GPUs for the poor crypto farmers and AI speculators.
While this may look like a good reason not to use the service, I learned of an even better reason just now from this article:
At the start of next year, GeForce Now will roll out a 100-hour monthly playtime allowance to continue providing exceptional quality and speed – as well as shorter queue times – for Performance and Ultimate members
Apparently you have to wait in line?!
To be fair, Xbox game pass cloud gaming, there are “peak times” where you may have to wait for an instance to open up. It really only happened for me on MS flight sim. But still notable
You also have to re-log in to Steam every fucking time.
This is the craziest part. They really make you feel uncomfortable and not really part of the system. You are just a subscription and nothing more, you get nothing, you own nothing, and you might as well give up and keep paying for a service you might be able to use
I was on the founder plan for a while because 50/year to keep an eye on the state of the tech wasn’t a huge deal, and there was plenty of stuff my MacBook wasn’t really powerful enough for but could tolerate the lag.
But the whole log-in process was way too much of a barrier for me to actually use it routinely.
Honestly, can’t remember the last time I queued. That said, maybe it’s a regional problem.
Yeah, they only have a finite number of servers that they can run VMs on, and are pretty consistently at max capacity. That said, there’s also limits on individual stream times, so after a certain amount of time you have to reconnect to continue playing (which, if you’re playing in a busy time, means re-queueing). So this at least keeps the line moving, in a way.
I haven’t tried it in a year or so, but when I played it last, I didn’t have very long lines; a minute at most, even at peak hours, on a free (deprioritized) account. Not the end of the world, but definitely an inconvenience.