Just over a year ago, NVIDIA finally brought GeForce NOW, its beta game streaming service for PC. The commercial launch of the service saw the introduction of two levels: a feature and a free tier for a limited time, and a paid Founders tier that offered a full set of features (including RTX) and priority access. Now that the company is in its second year of commercial service operation, NVIDIA is raising the price of paid GeForce NOW subscriptions, basically doubling to $ 10 / month (or $ 100 / year) for new members.
Officially, what NVIDIA is doing today with its subscription plans is twofold. First, the Founders’ plans, which from the beginning were advertised as a limited time offer, are finally being retired and will no longer be offered to new customers. In its place, the company is launching a new set of “Priority” associations, which are identical to the Founders’ old plans, offering the same resources and priority access.
The only significant change, other than the name on the plan, will be the price. While Founders’ plans cost $ 5 a month or $ 25 for a six-month subscription, GeForce NOW Priority subscriptions will be sold on a monthly or annual basis. Monthly plans now cost $ 10 per month (or more specifically, $ 9.99), while annual plans cost $ 100 ($ 99.99).
That said, as a thank you to the founding members – and undoubtedly aware of the public’s negative reaction to price increases – NVIDIA is also profiting from the old founders fee for existing customers, under what they call the “Founders for life” . This means that while new customers have to pay new and higher prices, existing customers will have their old prices blocked, as long as they remain in what NVIDIA calls a “regular” situation. Which, for all practical purposes, results in a 50% discount on the service for existing members.
In addition, the NVIDIA blog post announcing the price increase does not provide details on how to explain the reason for the increase. But it is not very surprising to see NVIDIA raising prices; even without the explicit limited-time nature of the founders’ packages, $ 5 / month was probably not covering all of NVIDIA’s costs, especially as evidenced by the price of comparable high-end instances from leading cloud service providers. If nothing else, this is a sign that NVIDIA is finally looking to make a real profit from the service, rather than just trying to cover the costs.
Overall, NVIDIA seems quite optimistic about the future of its exclusive cloud gaming service, despite the initial licensing problems last year and the impact on demand that will undoubtedly come from a price increase. According to the company, they are continuing to add capacity to the service, including opening a data center in Montreal later this year. Likewise, the company continues to expand its partnerships with the GeForce NOW Alliance to other countries, further increasing the number of countries that have local GeForce NOW servers.
Finally, while today’s news is largely focused on the business side of the service, NVIDIA mentions that a next service update will address update rate synchronization. With the 2.0.28 update, the server-side refresh rate will be set to match the client-side refresh rate, in order to take into account the existence of 60 Hz and 59.94 Hz screens. variation in refresh rates is not an issue with games locally, but similar to video streaming, it can be an issue with games in the cloud, as an incorrect match would lead to chatter and the occasional drop in frames.