Nvidia GeForce Now could be priced to smash Google Stadia

Rumored to cost $4.99 a month – and there’ll be a free tier, too

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Nvidia’s GeForce Nowgame streaming service is rumored to launch with two tiers, one of which is set to offer free access, and the other will be a paid subscription running to $4.99 (around £3.80, AU$7.45) monthly on an annual subscription.

This info comes from Videocardz, a pretty solid source when it comes to leaks (usually of the GPU variety, as the name suggests), which spilled some purported details for the service.

GeForce NOW Free🧽 Standard Access🧽 1-Hour Session LengthGeForce NOW FOUNDERS $4.99/Month (For 12 Months)🧽 Priority Access🧽 Extended Session Length🧽 RTX ON🧽 Free 90-day Introductory Period🧽 Limited Time OfferWe asked Jensen for more details 🤭January 30, 2020

This tweet reveals details apparently lifted from a leaked slide, suggesting GeForce Now Free will supposedly give users ‘standard access’ for a gaming session length of an hour at the most.

Whereas those paying $4.99 for the Founders package will get a longer ‘extended’ session length and ‘priority access’. Presumably this means that paying subscribers will jump the queue and get straight in, whereas freebie users will probably have to wait – potentially a fair while – before their session begins.

Subscribers also get the benefit of ray tracing visuals provided courtesy of the RTX- equipped servers thatNvidia first introduced in August 2019.

Presumably the ‘free 90-day introductory period’ means that subscribers won’t pay for the first three months. The final point is that the $4.99 asking price is a limited time offer, apparently (unless this refers to the free introductory period being a time-limited affair – we can but hope).

Nvidia is confident?

GeForce Now is still in (free) beta testing right now, but the prospect of a free tier for the final product is a compelling one. While queues might well be lengthy, and playtime limited to just that hour, at least this does give folks the facility to try out the service – and see how it performs on their broadband connection (a crucial factor).

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That in itself makes us think that perhapsNvidiais pretty confident about how GeForce Now will perform. Certainly, some of the early feedback we’ve seen is relatively positive, and our own experience of the service is that the “streaming quality is great” (albeit on the ‘balanced’ setting).

As ever with cloud gaming, though, performance will always be dependent on your internet connection, but GeForce Now does offer up the enticing prospect of being able to play the latest games on an ancient PC or laptop (or indeed an Android mobile phone).

Unlike other game streaming services, which offer a library of games, GeForce Now operates on the policy of letting you play your own games – from the likes ofSteamor other digital stores.

So in other words, Nvidia is providing the hardware (remotely) for your existing games library, so you don’t need to buy (and keep upgrading) an expensive gaming PC to get good frame rates. Or that’s certainly the theory, anyway.

The aggressively pitched $4.99 per month price (billed annually) is apparently due to Nvidia feeling the heat from the likes ofGoogle Stadia,Project xCloudandAmazon’s reportedly incoming offering which might hit this year.

All of which mean that Nvidia wants to start off competitively out of the gate – assuming that the rumor being peddled here is on the money, so to speak. Time will tell, as ever.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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