Nvidia Takes A Wild Step With GeForce Now, Asking Developers To Opt In Instead Of Opting Out

Nvidia Takes A Wild Step With GeForce Now, Asking Developers To Opt In Instead Of Opting Out
Credit: Multimedia | NVIDIA Newsroom

Nvidia has a game streaming service where you can maximize the quality of every title on their service, regardless of what your personal rig looks like (presuming that your internet can handle the streaming, of course). It’s a fantastic idea that has users paying a small monthly fee in order to stream their library through Nvidia’s powerhouses, presuming that they legally own the game and have connected the platform to Nvidia.

Everything seemed fantastic, and PC gaming was set to take another massive stride forward for the gaming industry as a whole, while possibly upsetting games as a service providers such as Ubisoft’s uPlay and EA Origin.

Yet shortly after the beta period for GeForce Now ended, developers began withdrawing en masse from the service, and Nvidia was all too quick to capitulate on the requests to remove the titles.

This led to a period of two months where the weekly news was what developers were withdrawing from GeForce Now; WB Games, 2K Games, and Xbox Game Studios are a small selection that requested their titles to be removed from the streaming service.

What followed was a lot of speculation, again, about the rights consumers actually had when they purchased a digital license for a title, but that was going to be placed on a back burner while overpaid lawyers earned their silver spoons by arguing over esoteric regulations that were mostly written before cars became a common sight on the streets of America.

Nvidia took to their blog today to announce a radical idea that they have and are moving forward with. Instead of presuming that every developer is fine with having their titles streamed via GeForce Now, Nvidia is instead asking developers to opt-in to the streaming service.

It’s a brilliant moment for the computing powerhouse to arrive at the idea to ask the companies who own the rights to the titles if they can use them, and it’s currently unknown if other companies will follow suit regarding requesting access to external IPs.

We can only hope.

The developers that haven’t opted into GeForce Now will have their titles removed from the streaming service effective May 31, meaning the library might get a bit smaller. Not enough for concern, however; Nvidia boasts over 2,000 titles available on the streaming service.

They end the blog post with ambivalent platitudes regarding the bright future of GeForce Now. Nvidia did not outright state which titles or studios were in danger of leaving the streaming service if developers did not respond by the deadline.

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