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.
What is a GeForce Now Subscription and why would you want a subscription to your graphic card? 🤔
It’s the same grift that every cloud provider does. The “You’ll save money because you’ll eliminate CapEx and only have OpEx instead of both!” And then they present you with numbers that look reasonable, hoping you don’t do the math.
CapEx - Capital expenditure = the cost of buying the things (ownership)
OpEx - Operating expenses = cost to run things
So, yeah, you don’t have to buy their overpriced $2000 GPU… you could just rent it! But renting it means you never own it, and the contract will state that the SLA will change. So they get you to sign up and then the prices change. And when your money is being dumped into the monthly bill, you are now constantly short what you’d need to buy the hardware and get yourself out of that hell. Ask anyone who’s accidentally left something running in AWS and got a MASSIVE bill. Or made an API but didn’t put rate limiting on it.
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.
Ignoring the GPU pricing issue, It was a really good option for Mac users to play games that don’t run on MacOS. One of my friends uses it to play with our friend group.
I also used it to play higher end games because my gpu is too weak to reliably play them, but my internet is fast enough to where streaming doesn’t cause any issues. (and I am not interested in paying for a gpu upgrade when I don’t regularly play high end games)
Imo, if you ignore the surrounding context, it’s a great option if you don’t want to pay exorbitant prices for GPUs just to play a modern game.
The real issue is that this problem was artificially manufactured by the companies offering the solution and is guaranteed to enshittify in the name of greed, as seen here.
As per usual, we can’t have nice things because of capitalism.
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.