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Seems that Nvidia have gone and put their foot in it again with their cloud streaming service GeForce Now. This time, they’ve failed to ask Hinterland Studio to include their game The Long Dark in the library. In return, Hinterland have asked for it to be removed from the service. This follows several other games being removed from GeForce Now, with some publishers pulling their entire catalog.
According to The Long Dark’s director Raphael van Lierop, Nvidia apologized for the lack of communication and asked if Hinterland would like to keep The Long Dark on the streaming platform. Hinterland declined.
Previously, Bethesda removed nearly all their games from GeForce Now. Activision Blizzard removed theirs due to a “misunderstanding” between them and Nvidia. They aren’t the only ones either. After the beta period of Nvidia’s service ended, Capcom, Konami, Rockstar, and Square Enix all declined to make their games available in the full release of the streaming library.
If nothing else, it seems Nvidia have a handful of business wrinkles to smooth out with their service. You do need to already own a game before you can stream it, but developers and publishers may have any number of reasons to not want their games played on hardware it wasn’t intended for, planned ports to other devices being just one possibility.
From Nvidia’s blog post when Bethesda withdrew their games, they feel they’ve got something to offer that developers will return to the service for. “Ultimately, they maintain control over their content and decide whether the game you purchase includes streaming on GeForce Now. Meanwhile, others will bring games back as they continue to realize GeForce Now’s value,” Nvidia say. Hinterland’s complaint seems largely to be with not being asked. As Nvidia say, perhaps they’ll reconsider in the future, though the failure to communicate isn’t a great look if developers are supposed to be opting in by choice.
Katharine recently rounded up what you need to know about all the latest streaming services out there and found GeForce Now to have some potential but a fussy interface. They’ve got a bit more than that to sort out if they’re to be charging players for priority access to their cloud service.