Nvidia’s cloud-based gaming service has not gotten off to a promising start. The platform exited beta in mid-February and within the first month of operation, major developers including Activision Blizzard, 2k Games, and Bethesda have pulled their entire libraries from GeForce Now. This deprives the cloud service of major titles including Overwatch and the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series.
The reasons behind these mass pullings have been the subject of much speculation, as the developers have by and large refused to provide comments. However, it is theorized that both Activision Blizzard and Bethesda took action after Nvidia added their games to GeForce Now without officially asking for permission. Alternately, developers may not approve of the fact that Nvidia’s service does not charge separately for cloud versions of its titles, unlike similar service Google Stadia.
However, the service has not shut down despite these difficulties. In fact, Nvidia announced that going forward, they will be adding new games to the service every Thursday. The first title announced was Control, a science fiction action game produced by Remedy Entertainment.
This announcement comes as less of a surprise given Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney’s public support of the cloud-based platform. He called the service both “developer-friendly” and “publisher-friendly” in a series of Tweets made earlier this month amidst the controversy surrounding Activision Blizzard and Bethesda’s withdrawal.
Epic is wholeheartedly supporting NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW service with Fortnite and with Epic Games Store titles that choose to participate (including exclusives), and we’ll be improving the integration over time.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) March 7, 2020
Epic Games recently secured the rights to all of Remedy Entertainment’s forthcoming titles. Control is currently an Epic Games Store exclusive title for PC.
Nvidia’s statement included the announcement that Control will be playable using Nvidia’s RTX cards, which use ray-tracing to provide more realistic visuals than other versions.
Other upcoming titles announced for GeForce Now included Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Dungeons 3, Headsnatchers, IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad, Jagged Alliance 2 – Wildfire, and The Guild 3. The statement did not include official release dates for these titles on the cloud-based service.
