Nvidia GeForce Now is putting video ads before play sessions on their free tier

We anticipate that this change will reduce average wait times for free users over time.

Yes, because huge swaths of people will no longer be using it.

That’s probably the point. They will never make money of people who will never upgrade to a paid membership.

I'm honestly surprised to learn they still offer a free tier, I'm not sure why? What advantage is letting users play for free?

Standard tactic since the early 2000s. Provide a service for next to nothing by dumping insane amounts of cash into it. Competition either can't hold up or is straight up bought up. Fast forward 5 years and you're the only real player left. Then you're a monopoly and can set the prices as you see fit. Best example of this is uber, but amazon and youtube have done it too
- There's really not any competition in the exact same line of business as them anymore. Amazon's Luna kinda? But not really, you have to buy new copies of games there - or subscribe to them. Other services like moonlight you have to host yourself.
Same reason drug dealers give out samples
- why drug dealers? not really known for their samples except in DARE films. I think Costco would be a better example. are they doing that again btw?
Win the race to the bottom

This is just peak enshittification at this point.

It's a free service, and a game streaming one at that...
I'm the last person to be defending companies but this one really doesn't sound unreasonable

Wait, can I game on my old laptop?
- Yeah, as long as it can run a modern version of Chrome and can decode video fast enough.

So much of the internet is enshittifying abuse of this moronic term enshittify.

It's fucking free. Youtube had ads before FREE videos forever ago. This isn't new. This isn't enshittifying. What an idiotic post.

I agree with everything you're saying but also fuck Nvidia.
Isn't GeForce Now only available if you buy an Nvidia graphics card? In that case I would consider it part of the product that was sold, not a free software

Ignore my comment, GeForce experience is what I was thinking of.
- They did remove GameStream though, which was GFNow but for using from your PC. Or rather GFNow was GameStream but from their PC.
  
  And they took that out, so you couldn't stream locally any more. And not enough people called them out for that.
  
  You can replace it with Sunshine and Moonlight if you ever find yourself wondering why an nVidia Shield won't connect to your PC.
The enshitification discourse on lemmy is fucking nuts. Service goes from you getting a gaming PC completely free, no strings attached except your play session is limited to hour, to the same thing but you see preroll ads while you queue. Any person with more than two braincells could tell it was meant to be a trial for the paid service, but of course people on here are gonna cry because they don't get free toys anymore.
- That's not the point I was making in the post. I was just showing what was happening with it. I've also been a paid subscriber to it on and off; my gripe with it is that it already takes about 5 to 10 minutes to queue into the service (Priority queue for paying ofc), but with this new system it will only start to add you to the queue after you watch the pre-rolls. If it played them while you were stuck in queue, that'd be no big issue to me.

I never really got this service, you got to rent hardware but then devs and publishers could tell nvidia that I can't use my rented hardware to play my bought games?

I think that's just a concession from Nvidia, and they wouldn't really have to pull any games from the service.
It's a far cry better than Google or Amazon making you buy the game on their service specifically.

It's still cloud gaming. So it still sucks. But at least they're not trying to force you into a shitty locked in storefront. (Though not keeping your Steam login is definitely a pain point.)
- I only went to GfN because Stadia shut down; I think Stadia did it the best way that you probably could tbh.

Fuuuuuck cloud gaming

Umm...not enshittification. Plenty of reasons to hate on Nvidia this is not one of them.

I used to have the "Founders Edition" subscription tier from when GeForce Now was introduced. It was like 25$/quarter and a limited time offer for the first subscribers of GeForce Now. It was on par with the premium tier (best servers, no time limit, and best quality + ray tracing). Of course, over the years, it got degraded to second best servers, 6 hour session limit, max. 1080p and so on ... Then I quit.

Honestly, just make the free service a restricted demo. We don't need more ads.

I wanted to try free tier, but amount of time spending to wait in line to play a game was too much.add in that it was laggy and you can't just leave and come back. Now they will get free ad space for people who didn't even try service yet due... Amount of wait time in line. But speaking as someone who is redirected to Russian servers by default (too small country to have local server of course). Wonder how free tier experience for others in "good" countries.

I didn't even know they had a free teir. I could a been playing Fortnite this whole time

Xbox Gaming Pass allows you to play Fortnite for free too. If you have a Samsung TV it's even easier, just plug the controller on the TV.

I got an email about that too.

Not sure why because I don't think I ever got it to work.

It depends on your system, but there's a desktop and mobile app as well as an unofficial app for Linux.

The enshittification continues.

Here's a service that was making money, but we've figured we can make more money by interrupting it regularly.

It's only being added for the free tier
- So far.
How was the free tier making money before ads?
- I'm no business genius, but usually free tiers are given away as loss leaders as as part of purchase packages as a way of growing customer base.
  
  Why does Lemmy always provide an obligatory contrarian comment? Is this a free service that they might start putting ads in?

matter of time before they put ads in the paid tier too.

subscriptions suck.

We're talking about a gaming streaming platform. How do you think that concept could ever work without a subscription?

And frankly, adds for the free users really isn't that outrageous or surprising either. I'm mostly surprised that this wasn't the case from the start.
- this is not what im saying though.
  
  i said this will be the first point of enshittification on the paid plan, exactly like on movie streaming platforms.

Can't you just run a different driver or are all Nvidias bricks now?

These ads are for their game streaming service, not GPU drivers
- Thank you!

Ahh yes. Another reason to switch sides later this year.

What’s the other side for free cloud gaming?
- It’s entirely possible that I did not remember Nvidia Now was their cloud gaming service and that my comment was maybe slightly misguided by my own stupidity.
- ~~buy a Nvidia card and host it yourself~~

Free user? Even after paying a buttload for the hardware?

GeForce Now is Nvidia cloud service, what do you mean hardware?
- Lemmy moment.