Nvidia's GeForce Nows free tier will soon show you up to two minutes of ads while you wait to play - proving nowhere is safe from commercials

Date:
Tue, 27 Feb 2024 12:01:06 +0000

Description:
Brace yourself gamers Nvidias free tier of GeForce will soon show you up to two minutes of ads while you wait to play

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Nvidias free tier of GeForce Now, its cloud gaming service, will soon run up to two minutes of ads before you play, according to Nvidia spokesperson Stephanie Ngo.

GeForce Now is a service offered by Nvidia that allows you to connect to digital PC game stores and stream games you already own across a multitude of different devices - including Macs, Windows laptops, iPhones and iPads, Android phones, and more.

It offers three membership tiers, with the free membership offering a queue system with an hour-long gaming session length that will then bring you back to the start of the queue once your time is up. Its in this waiting time that the ads will be shown, so while it could be a little annoying, your actual gameplay time wont be interrupted.

The ads will help pay for the free tier service and keep it free, with Ngo adding that the change is also expected to reduce wait times for free users
in the long run - though its not entirely clear at this point how thats going to work. Perhaps Nvidia is expecting the arrival of ads to push users to pay for the premium tiers or simply drive some users away from the platform entirely - either would, in theory, help reduce queues for the free tier. GeForce Now users should expect an email on 27 Feb to let them know about the changes. Major inconvenience or just meh?

Im not a user of Nvidias game-streaming service myself, but I reached out to GeForce Now Members within the TechRadar team and learned that wait times currently fluctuate between five to fifteen minutes - and scrolling through the GeForce Now subreddit proves that wait times can go on even longer.

Most people who use the free tier of GeForce Now go in aware that they will
be spending a not-insignificant amount of time in a queue, so in reality, two minutes of ads when you know youre likely going to be waiting for longer anyway isnt much of an inconvenience - it might even help kill some time.
Many users are likely to simply do something else while queuing for their
free hour timeslot anyway, so why shouldnt Nvidia get some extra ad revenue from it?

That being said, it is a gloomy example of the inescapable modern torture of being advertised at non-stop. Almost every facet of the internet is packed with ads at this point (this article included - sorry about that, but weve
got to eat!) and while a lot of platforms offer ad-free paid tiers, it seems like that isnt enough anymore.

Amazon Prime has received a lot of (well-deserved) flak for slapping ads onto paid memberships , and Netflixs ad-supported free tier wasnt very well-received either. While Nvidias latest move seems fairly innocuous right now, whos to say the up to two minutes wont extend further in the future, until youre sat watching a full ten minutes of commercials to play an hour-long session of your current favorite game? Do you just give in and buy
a paid membership? I just might, personally - but I wouldnt be happy about
it.

Via The Verge You might also like... I created an AI app in 10 minutes and I might never think about artificial intelligence in the same way again Nvidia CEO predicts the death of coding Jensen Huang says AI will do the work, so kids don't need to learn Lenovos unassuming new ThinkPads just became my favorite laptops of MWC heres why



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/software/nvidias-geforce-nows-free-tier-wi ll-soon-show-you-up-to-two-minutes-of-ads-while-you-wait-to-play-proving-nowhe re-is-safe-from-commercials


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