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Just over a year ago, NVIDIA finally released GeForce NOW, its PC game streaming service, from beta. The commercial launch of the service saw the introduction of two tiers: a feature and a time-limited free tier, and a paid Founders tier that offered a full feature set (including RTX) and priority access. Now that the company is in its second year of operating commercial service, NVIDIA is now raising the price of paid GeForce NOW subscriptions, essentially doubling them to $ 10 / month (or $ 100 / year) for new members.
Officially, what NVIDIA is doing today with its subscription plans is twofold. First, Founders plans, which were advertised as a limited time offer from the very beginning, are ultimately being phased out and will no longer be offered to new customers. In their place, the company is launching a new set of “priority” subscriptions, which are otherwise identical to the old Founders plans, offering the same functionality and priority access.
The only significant change, other than the name on the plan, will be the price. While Founders plans were $ 5 per month or $ 25 for a six-month subscription, GeForce NOW Priority subscriptions will be sold on a monthly or annual basis. Monthly plans are now $ 10 per month (or more precisely $ 9.99), while annual plans are $ 100 ($ 99.99).
That said, as a thank you to their founding members – and no doubt aware of the negative public reaction to price increases – NVIDIA also grants grandfathered rights to old founders tariffs for existing customers as part of what they call their benefit “Founders for Life”. This means that while new customers will have to pay the new, higher prices, existing customers will have their old prices locked in as long as they stay in what NVIDIA calls “in good standing.” Which, for all intents and purposes, is a 50% discount on service for existing members.
Beyond that, NVIDIA’s blog post announcing the price increase does not go into detail as to the reason for the increase. But it’s not terribly surprising to see NVIDIA raise its prices; even without the explicit, time-limited nature of the founding packages, $ 5 / mo probably did not cover all of NVIDIA’s costs, especially as evidenced by the price of comparable high-end instances from major cloud service providers. If nothing else, it’s a sign that NVIDIA is finally looking to make real profit from the service, rather than just trying to cover the costs.
Overall, NVIDIA seems rather optimistic about the future of its one-stop cloud gaming service, even with the licensing startup issues over the past year and the demand hit that will undoubtedly come from. a price increase. According to the company, they continue to add capacity to the service, including setting up a data center in Montreal later this year. Likewise, the company continues to expand its GeForce NOW Alliance partnerships to other countries, further increasing the number of countries with local GeForce NOW servers.
Finally, while today’s news is largely focused on the business side of the service, NVIDIA mentions that an upcoming service update will deal with refresh rate synchronization. With Update 2.0.28, the server-side refresh rate will be set to match the client-side refresh rate to account for the existence of both 60Hz and 59.94Hz displays. This small variation in refresh rates is not an issue with games locally, but similar to video streaming, it can be an issue with cloud gaming as a mismatch will result in occasional stuttering and dropped frames.
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