Nvidia’s free version of GeForce Now, its cloud gaming service, will soon show up to two minutes of ads before you play, according to Nvidia spokesperson Stephanie Ngo.
GeForce Now is a service offered by Nvidia that lets you connect to digital PC game stores and stream games you already own on a variety of devices, including Macs, Windows laptops, iPhones and iPads, Android phones and more .
It offers three levels of membership, with the free membership offering a queuing system with an hour-long play session, which then returns you to the start of the queue once your time is up. The ads will run during this wait time, so while it can be a bit annoying, your actual playtime won’t be interrupted.
The ads will help pay for the free service and keep it free, with Ngo adding that the change is also expected to reduce wait times for free users in the long run – although it’s not entirely clear at the moment how that will work. Perhaps Nvidia expects that the arrival of ads will either push users to pay for the premium tiers or simply drive some users away from the platform – both of which would, in theory, help reduce queues for the free tier. GeForce Now users can expect an email on February 27 notifying them of the changes.
Major inconvenience or just…meh?
I’m not a user of Nvidia’s game streaming service myself, but I reached out to GeForce Now members within the Ny Breaking team and learned that wait times currently hover between five and fifteen minutes – and scrolling through the GeForce Now subreddit proves that waiting times can continue even longer.
Most people who use the free version of GeForce Now are aware that they will spend a not insignificant amount of time in the queue, so essentially two minutes of ads when you know you will probably have to wait longer anyway. it’s not that big of an inconvenience – it might even help pass some time. Many users will probably just be doing something else while queuing for their free hour anyway, so why couldn’t Nvidia get some extra ad revenue out of it?
That being said, it is a bleak example of the inescapable modern torture of non-stop advertising. Almost every facet of the internet is full of ads right now (including this article – sorry about that, but we have to eat!) and while many platforms offer ad-free paid tiers, it seems that’s not the case. t enough more.
Amazon Prime has received a lot of (well-deserved) criticism for putting ads on paid memberships, and Netflix’s ad-supported free tier hasn’t been very well received either. While Nvidia’s latest move seems fairly innocuous at the moment, who’s to say that the ‘two minute maximum’ won’t continue in the future, until you’re sitting through ten minutes of watching commercials to complete an hour-long session of play your music? current favorite game? Do you just give in and buy a paid membership? Personally maybe, but I wouldn’t be happy about it.
Through The edge