Nvidia was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week to talk up a bunch of its products and services, including its GeForce Now game streaming service — which will become available on most Mac and Windows PCs (instead of just Nividia hardware) via downloadable app launching this March.
This is effectively Nvidia’s big push into providing a remote game streaming service, à la OnLive, Gaikai, and Shinra; game industry watchers may recall that each of those services was eventually shut down or acquired.
Of course Nvidia’s been operating its game streaming service for some time — it made a show of trying to entice devs onto the platform last year — but as of now it only streams games to Nvidia hardware like the Nvidia Shield handheld game console, Shield tablet, and the Shield TV, an Android-powered TV microconsole.
The service will be revamped next month when its Windows and Mac clients roll out, and it will have an interesting hourly pricing scheme: customers can register with the service and either freely stream games from a remote PC equipped with a GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card for 4 hours, or freely stream games from a GTX 1060-equipped (and thus presumably less capable) remote machine for 8 hours.
If they’d like to play more, Nvidia says it will then charge $25 for 20 hours streaming games from a GTX 1060 PC or 10 hours from a GTX 1080 machine. This seems like a significant departure from the way GeForce Now currently works — customers pay $8/month for access to a library of 50+ streamable games.