NVIDIA has announced that starting January 1, 2026, each GeForce NOW cloud gaming subscription will be limited to 100 hours of play time per month. The company is implementing its long-lasting promise revealed in 2024, with the option for users to purchase additional play time as needed. Under the standard Performance tier, which costs $9.99 per month, after the 100-hour play time is reached, users can buy extra 15-hour blocks for $2.99 each. For the Ultimate tier, priced at $19.99 per month, additional 15-hour blocks are available for $5.99 each.
Since months are averaged to about 30.437 days, any play time exceeding the 100-hour limit is rounded up to the next 15-hour block, potentially leading to extra charge if someone wants more play time. For instance, playing around three hours per day (approximately 91 hours per month) remains within the base fee, but playing four hours daily (about 122 hours per month) results in extra costs of approximately $15.97 on the Performance tier or $31.97 on the Ultimate tier.
Capitalism will find ways to create capital, usually ending in rents. Neither free markets nor regulated can solve this as it is rooted in a contradiction.
Rent your shit, and be a slave of price changes.
When you agree to a subscription, you are enrolling to get fuck, sooner or later.
This is ultimately just punching sideways and down though.
These companies will win when your strategy is to simply shit on other people for existing.
You may not think that is what you’re doing but it is. How so? Because while you care about this area of life enough to get into the details, for other people, their areas of care are completely different, and it is unreasonable for you to expect everyone to care about precisely what you care about.
As such, punching down and sideways only serves the purpose of making an environment where only the rich and powerful band together, and the poor (us) routinely infight and chop off our own legs rather than realizing that these megacorps hiring leagues of lobbyists, psychologists, marketers, etc know exactly how to push, and know that exactly the person you are bitching at will almost certainly never see your comment, or will consider it hostile and irrelevant so it wont matter either way.
Haaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
I wish I could find the people on Reddit that called me a lunatic when I said subscription services always enshitify, NO MATTER WHAT. It’s a matter of when, not if.
Like every comment like yours that I have ever seen, I would bet money you didn’t quite say what you are claiming to say here, didn’t say it in a way that would imply the same thing, and didn’t get quite the reaction you are saying you got.
And this is combined with cutting Blackwell production by 40% and exacerbating a market already dominated by scalpers and AI data centers. Everything is getting enshittified, subscription just one component of it.
I’ve always held out for PCMR but these companies are making it near impossible - or just prohibitively expensive - to be a PC gamer.
The goal is to get you to rent your computer forever.
AI, vast datacenters, hardware “shortages”, cloud services, DRM, TPM… it’s all part of the same pipeline: remove compute power from the user and concentrate it under control of the manufacturers in order to lease it back to the public in tightly controlled environments.
Hanlon’s razor applies here. The margins for selling to datacenters are higher for the producers of RAM and GPU’s. The chance that it is some kind of conspiracy is very small.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Where “happy” is a euphemism for something not to be said amongst mixed company.
I will use old machine until the damn thing quits on me and be happy.
I can’t bring myself to throw anything out anymore. Someday, when all my working PCs have worn out, a $200 bottom of the barrel 32bit netbook could be the last thing standing between me and having to rent compute from some shitty tech company who doesn’t respect my first amendment rights, hides any advanced configuration from the end user, and has an AI constantly rewriting my files to remove any objectionable language, like YouTube or Facebook, but in my home. I’ll hack my toaster to run Linux before I let that happen.
Currently running a ~10 y/o Dell-XPS laptop that still runs absolutely great.
Yes, but this only works if said concentrated manufacturer group also holds all IP and power means to prevent competition on the market they don’t want filled.
It’s like a monopoly protected by navy, something right out of 1600s, if such a state of things is established in some countries, all the others will have an advantageous route of peaceful development, except with higher risk of war and sabotage from the former group. Almost like colonial unpleasantness between Iberian monarchies on one side and England and Netherlands on the other. From the point of the former, they had the Papal blessing and divine ownership of the New World divided between them, and the latter were heretics and thieves. From the point of the latter, the former didn’t have any exclusive rights to unpopulated by Europeans lands overseas. While the popular narrative (right out of Sabatini’s books and such) portrays the former as bad and the latter as good, I’ll notice that the former did less of racism and slavery and genocide, and their former colonies are culturally mixed unique nations. Unlike British colonies, which are all, even USA, sort of England overseas with diverged dialects.
The point is - there are legal arguments which might eventually become bigger conflicts.
So - you won’t do anything to already consolidated power. This might become a new global split, in political dimension driven by economic interest. Already in testing, in fact, with Gaza and other recent conflicts. And it would be a shame if most western countries turned up on the wrong side, because that wouldn’t make the other side better than it really is, but it really would have an advantage in development. You can forbid people to produce and own universal personal computers for all kinds of use only if they live under your control.
Aren’t they making a shitton of money? They can’t even use the usual enshittification excuses, this is just being greedy dicks.
Gamer Nexus said it best pointing it out that the tech bros want to do to computers what private equity did to the housing market of turning everything into subscriptions.
They can’t even use the usual enshittification excuses, this is just being greedy dicks.
The usual enshitification excuses are companies just being greedy dicks, and more than anything, a lack of regulation enforcement existing to stop companies simply outspending other companies out of business.
I’m guessing they want to sell more computing power to AI bc they make more that way
The excuse is, and has always been, “Because we can”. Never think otherwise.
There is little difference between enshitificstion and being greedy dicks.
A shitton is not the amount they are aiming for. All is the goal.
Friendly reminder that there are a bunch of fantastic indie games out there that don’t have insane graphic card requirements for a smooth frame rate.
At this point I scowel at any game with higher minimum hardware requirements than fallout 4. Like, come on, did you really need all that shit?
results in extra costs of approximately $15.97 on the Performance tier or $31.97 on the Ultimate tier.
Wouldn’t these be the total costs: base fee + overages? ($9.99+ 2*$2.99) or ($19.99 + 2*$5.99)
Not defending it, just want to correct the math
100hours is quite a bit but also fuck Nvidia.
I can’t imagine this will make Nvidia much money at all. The vast, vast majority of people aren’t playing more than 100 hours of videogames a month but having a tagline that you can play as much as you want is a very attractive offer to a consumer, at least to me.
Yea… 100 hours a month of your life consuming 1 form of media is… a lot.
100hours is quite a bit
10hrs for 10 days… oops busted…
Yeah that was basically my thought too. I probably do less than a quarter of that on average, but that’s not really the point. I should be allowed as much time as I want. Not that I use a Nvidia subscription anyway, but still. This makes me mad on behalf of other people.
Oh dear… I was in hospital a few weeks ago and I’ve been recovering at home. In the last two weeks I’ve manly played three games: 64 hours in the first, 50 hours in the second, and 10 hours in the third (that one was all in one day)
I’d never use a thing like GeForce Now either way, but I’d be boned hahaha
Dunno, still pretty cheap for so much entertainment
How good is hospital recovery?
Sure, there’s some cons, but you basically get a free card to game relentlessly, undisturbed, and guilt-free. Tragically, you eventually heal up and have to go back to being a normie.
Oh my gawd it’s best thing. Hospital was insane but very interesting and by the time I got home I was feeling pretty awesome… my boss told me to not think about work and that he set me up for a leave of absence I still get paid for with HR. I’m treasuring every day.
saw this coming the second I heard about GeForce cloud gaming…never in a million years will I subscribe to play games. wow was the only exception to that rule previously, but now I just run my own server locally so even that, never again
What a way to basically double prices for users that actually use the service as it was promoted…
Ngreedia
What is a GeForce Now Subscription and why would you want a subscription to your graphic card? 🤔
Basically you rent NVIDIA’s GPUs, they render the games, stream to you. This way you “save” money by not having to, heyoooo what a surprise, buy cards that have been getting more and more expensive over the years because of reasons that totally have nothing to do with GPU manufacturers.
Thanks! That seems wild, I never knew that existed.
You need at least better than average internet and even then it’s not the best experience.
It’s game streaming, except you stream an entire PC.
Forgive my ignorance, but does this mean that my gforce card performance will be degraded if I don’t pay for this subscription? Why would I want to use this cloud gaming to play games I already own?
No, not if you own your own card/gaming pc. This is about their cloud gaming service where the game is run on their servers and streamed to you.
Have you ever tried it? It sounds like a ping nightmare, especially for multiplayer. You gotta wait first for the game server lag and then again while you wait for Nvidia to remotely render your draw call?
I know this service exists but it has always sounded absolutely terrible to me.
The latency is way better than you’d expect, but still noticeably worse than local. I think if you’ve got a decent connection and Nvidia has a server nearby it’s about the same as 1 extra frame of lag (or playing on a TV without game mode…)
Okay, thanks.
Because some people have digital libraries but no hardware to run them on.
At the very least, this is a loss in gaming accessibility by cost since a month of GeForce Now used to be a decent gaming backup for when mygaming system was down (had to RMA GPU) or a friend wanted to test the PC gaming waters.
That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.
YOU VILL OWN NOTHING, GOY!!
Some of the comments on this story sound really addicted to PC gaming.
Yea even if you’re literally landlocked to Nvidia and have no other platforms / interests, I still don’t get how 3 hours a day would be a problem.
Smart timing though with the kids on winter break. They’re for sure getting that extra charge this month lol.
So, let’s do some breakdown. Let’s say 365.25 days per year. Divide by 12, that’s 30.4375 days per month. 100 hours per month is 3.29 hours per day. That’s almost 23 hours per week.
A reasonable person working 8-5 might get 2 hours of recreation per day during the week. That takes up 2 hours per day, 5 days a week for 10 hours during the week. That leaves 13 hours on the weekend, or 6.5 hours per day.
Realistically, that’s a reasonable amount of time to play video games. On the other hand, fuck these arbitrary restrictions, play games locally.
If you only get 2 hours of recreation a day then your life fucking sucks or you have shit time management skills.
God I would hate my life if I only had 2 hours of me time a day.
Only 2 hours of recreation a day seems like a terrible time to me, unless you have kids, in which case I get that’s how it is when they’re small.
I spend like 1 hour in the morning to get ready and travel to work, then about the same to get home and have dinner. Let’s say 1 hour for chores every day (though even if I do both laundry and cleaning the same day it won’t take that long, and I don’t do those every day.) That leaves me with at least 5 hours a day for recreation.
But weekends are 14 hours of recreation per day, not 6.5 surely? 8 hours sleep + 2 hours for some extra time to cook good food etc. and we already did most chores during the week.
I sometimes spend a weekend gaming, but most of the time many of those hours are spent on a variety of things like visiting family, sports, crafts, going downtown etc. because I like a lot of different recreation. But yeah, we can certainly agree on fuck arbitrary restrictions, and everyone should be able to own their own things. Would just be very interested to know where you are coming from with those numbers.
I can only imagine you might be in the US and a lot of it is driving? That seems to suck, I would hate to drive for hours every day :(
Your definition of “reasonable” is way low I think. Especially with a lot of people working from home so their time isn’t eaten up by driving anymore. I do not know a single gamer who doesn’t consistently put in over 3 hours a day average. More broadly most people I know put that much time into their hobbies (many with kids).
6.5 hours per day every weekend does not seem reasonable or healthy to me.
Hell, if someone was exercising that much or fishing or knitting or any hobby, it wouldn’t seem healthy. Once in a while, sure. But, not every weekend.
There’s a lot of unhappy gamers downvoting us.
I long for the weekends where we spend all waking hours gaming on the C64
