GeForce NOW, the cloud gaming service from NVIDIA, officially launched out of beta earlier this month.
GeForce NOW allows gamers to play their own PC games on low-end PC, Macs, and even Android devices. This is considered by many to be an advantage in comparison to Google's Stadia, which is its own platform with a relatively small library of games for the time being.
However, GeForce NOW does not support games from all publishers. In fact, many big ones such as Capcom, Electronic Arts, Rockstar Games and Square Enix are missing, and yesterday the biggest Western publisher - Activision Blizzard - also joined this growing list.
NVIDIA itself announced the bad news on the GeForce NOW forums.
As we take GeForce NOW to the next step in its evolution, we’ve worked with publishers to onboard a robust catalog of your PC games. This means continually adding new games, and on occasion, having to remove games – similar to other digital service providers.
Per their request, please be advised Activision Blizzard games will be removed from the service. While unfortunate, we hope to work together with Activision Blizzard to reenable these games and more in the future. In addition to the hundreds of games currently supported, we have over 1,500 games that developers have asked to be on-boarded to the service. Look for weekly updates as to new games we are adding.
Needless to say, this is a major blow to GeForce NOW. Activision Blizzard owns several of the most popular games, from Call of Duty to World of Warcraft, Overwatch and Diablo III, as well as hits like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, Spyro Reignited Trilogy, and Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled.
While the free tier is certainly very appealing in theory as it allows infinite gameplay session (albeit limited to one-hour length each), gamers will only use GeForce NOW if they can play their favorite titles on the platform. NVIDIA seems to think it could get Activision Blizzard to come back; we'll surely let you know if that happens. Until then, stay tuned.
