If you’re that serious about gaming then build a gaming PC. I seriously hate dealing with subscriptions lately…
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Nvidia Capping Monthly GeForce NOW Playtime at 100 Hours
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Meanwhile Apple would have to pay users to spend 100 hours on Apple Arcade
It is at least mathematically possible.
Lets say 94% are "normal" people who would use the system for an hour four or five times a week. That means 4.5 hours a week at most or 20 per month.
Now lets say 6 % are Actual addicts who play video games whenever they are not sleeping, lets say 10 hours a day 6 days a week. They might burn through 240 hours per month. A very few might even cut down on sleeping, so they can play more.
Let's normalize this to one player. 240 * 0.06 = 14.4, 20 * 0.94 = 18.8
I just made up these numbers but if they are even close to right it shows that 6% of the user can be using almost half of the available hours.
This is true with a lot of unlimited service. Look at gym membership. The vast majority of the members rarely go at all, some go for an hour a week and a few basically live at the gym. One of these gym rats might use the equipment as much as 100 times more than average people.
It is very possible that one player uses 2 hours and another player uses 200 hours. If so, it is very possible that a minority of users are using the majority of the available hours.
Granted this is 2022 information from the UK, but it's illustrative:
Microsoft Xbox Cloud Gaming 60–70
Nvidia GeForce Now 10–20
Sony PlayStation cloud 10–20
Google Stadia 0–5
Amazon Luna 0–5
So not quite.
if you’re someone who games an average of ~3.2 hours per diem, 10$ per month seems like great price for renting a computer with a gaming GPU. And I think it even includes rentals of the games too. But I can’t imagine this would be a very enjoyable experience with all the latency having an Internet between the computer and monitor and keyboard would introduce. Especially with the type of games with high graphical requirements that a player may want to rent a GPU for, which probably include lots of first-person-shooter-style games that require fast reactions. But this should be great for a high-graphics turn-based game.
Translation: "Nvidia says that limiting playtime will allow us to milk our most loyal customers of even more money."
100 hours a month is equivalent to a part time job. hopefully if they also have one of those they can afford the paltry $9.99 a month the service cost. The energy usage of an NVIDIA GPU over 100 hours (300 watts x 100 hours x 35 cents per kilowatt hour = $10.50) probably costs the company about that much just to run the service.
The reason it has a profound impact is that the 6% of users putting in more than 100 hours a month are putting in *way* more. Experience from my game developer days says the distribution is probably a hockey stick shaped graph.
They need to cut costs
The EU would say “NVidia has a 100% monopoly on the NVidia GeForce Now cloud gaming service!”
Yet you were talking about GPU and AMD never being able to compete, which doesn't really have much to do with this.
Well... except for microsoft running their service on XBOX hardware... with AMD GPUs.
Interesting take. It reminds me of back when unlimited data with cell carriers was ACTUALLY unlimited. I believed the statistic was something along the lines of the top 1% of data users use 90% of the data.
Edit - My numbers were slightly off, but they were close. Some studies from a quick Google search:
Top 10% of users use 90% of data
Top 1% of users use 50% of data
I use Geforce now to play AAA PC games in my Mac, and I never go beyond 100 playing hours a month due to having a life.
Have you tried it? I use it to play Cyberpunk in 4K with all graphic options at max on my Mac and it's buttery smooth. Unless you play competitive online shooters I doubt you will feel any input lag. I haven't.
In my opinion this is actually the future of gaming.
This is how ensh*ttifiaction works.
-Degrade the service.
-Claim that it only affects a small number of users.
-Then introduce a more expensive or cheaper tier to make current ones look like amazing value.
-Rinse and repeat until the product is a shadow of its former self.
...so instead you sit in a gray office 8.5h/6 days a week instead, drive a Subaru station waggon?
These 6% will probably use a huge portion of all streaming time.
It's like 6% of all citizen earning as much as the rest of them. If your main leisure time is gaming it seems not pure evil to me, if you have to pay a little extra.
I don't understand all the hate against Nvidia here and everywhere these couple of days.
It's like 6% of all citizen earning as much as the rest of them. If your main leisure time is gaming it seems not pure evil to me, if you have to pay a little extra.
I don't understand all the hate against Nvidia here and everywhere these couple of days.
I've tried several of the streaming options over the years. The one I have most exposure to is xcloud because it's part of my game pass. Even with perfect setups, I can tell. Like I said, very few games are playable for me because I'm incredibly sensitive to it and notice it regardless. Even a single player game is annoying, but playable. I always max out look/camera sensitivity which is what makes it the most noticeable. There is a slight delay when I let go of my thumbstick and when it stops on screen. It's the same with really low end or xlarge TVs or monitors with a crappy response time. I can't play comfortably on anything with higher than 3ms response time. Back in high school, I had to hook up my ps3 to an older crt tv because the flat screen we had at the time had like an 8+ms response time. Guitar Hero on expert was absolutely unplayable. It will never be the main future for that reason primarily. Don't get me wrong, it's a great option for those that need it or if it plays just fine for them. I use xcloud on longer trips when I get especially bored, but that doesn't happen all too often. The tech they are developing for it is useful in other areas as well (game optimization, infrastructure, hardware, etc.), so I'm not saying it should die out. I'm just surprised they're still going after others have gone under. It should never be positioned as the primary way of gaming or replacing local gaming. I do hope that they can get it nearly imperceivable, but that's not currently possible. That would be great to be able to untether my Quest 3 from my PC, but I can't do that now because I notice the lag in Virtual Desktop plus the compression artifacts.
Fun times ahead.
I suspect some of this is to cover up for the pricing disaster going on in the server GPU market at the moment and to retain NVidia's margins as looking healthy so they can show everything is fine. People literally halted buying them in the last 2-4 weeks because there was a massive oversupply due to all the ML hype. Providers are selling GPU in bulk time near cost and it's creeping down. The margins are gone. No point in having all that kit lying around if no one uses it or it makes a loss which is where it is heading.
I suspect some of this is to cover up for the pricing disaster going on in the server GPU market at the moment and to retain NVidia's margins as looking healthy so they can show everything is fine. People literally halted buying them in the last 2-4 weeks because there was a massive oversupply due to all the ML hype. Providers are selling GPU in bulk time near cost and it's creeping down. The margins are gone. No point in having all that kit lying around if no one uses it or it makes a loss which is where it is heading.
As a former gamer who gamed too much but got lucky I had the talent to succeed in career and education while I watched friends and family ruin theirs, I do hope for the current and future generations, gaming does not become a primary recreational activity that can be played more than 3 hours every day…
3 hours a day every single day of the week is a freakin' lot.
They shouldn't just cap your account, they should call a helpline for you or something.