NVIDIA Puts 100-Hour Monthly Limit on All GeForce NOW Subscriptions
NVIDIA has announced that starting January 1, 2026, each GeForce NOW cloud gaming subscription will be limited to 100 hours of play time per month. The company is implementing its long-lasting promise revealed in 2024, with the option for users to purchase additional play time as needed. Under the standard Performance tier, which costs $9.99 per month, after the 100-hour play time is reached, users can buy extra 15-hour blocks for $2.99 each. For the Ultimate tier, priced at $19.99 per month, additional 15-hour blocks are available for $5.99 each.
Since months are averaged to about 30.437 days, any play time exceeding the 100-hour limit is rounded up to the next 15-hour block, potentially leading to extra charge if someone wants more play time. For instance, playing around three hours per day (approximately 91 hours per month) remains within the base fee, but playing four hours daily (about 122 hours per month) results in extra costs of approximately $15.97 on the Performance tier or $31.97 on the Ultimate tier.
The goal is to get you to rent your computer forever.
AI, vast datacenters, hardware “shortages”, cloud services, DRM, TPM… it’s all part of the same pipeline: remove compute power from the user and concentrate it under control of the manufacturers in order to lease it back to the public in tightly controlled environments.
You will own nothing and be happy.
I will use old machine until the damn thing quits on me and be happy.
I can't bring myself to throw anything out anymore. Someday, when all my working PCs have worn out, a $200 bottom of the barrel 32bit netbook could be the last thing standing between me and having to rent compute from some shitty tech company who doesn't respect my first amendment rights, hides any advanced configuration from the end user, and has an AI constantly rewriting my files to remove any objectionable language, like YouTube or Facebook, but in my home. I'll hack my toaster to run Linux before I let that happen.
Currently running a ~10 y/o Dell-XPS laptop that still runs absolutely great.
Same, I have a 2011 and 2015 MacBook. And a 2008 iMac and Mac Pro that are about to get Linuxed because the web certs won’t update anymore.
Librewolf has extended the live of the newer machines. But os support is the hardest part.
Have you looked at this?: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/ I used it on my 2015 iMac and it runs the latest OS well.
That’s probably my next move, but I also have some legacy apps I don’t want to lose access to.
Where "happy" is a euphemism for something not to be said amongst mixed company.
Hanlon’s razor applies here. The margins for selling to datacenters are higher for the producers of RAM and GPU’s. The chance that it is some kind of conspiracy is very small.
Did we not just have a clear cut example of DRAM manufacturers working out back room deals with OpenAI for 40% of global supply, causing the price of RAM to skyrocket? Seems pretty conspiratorial to me.
Yea? And they got a higher margin for that most likely. That it is a big order does not make it some kind of conspiracy.
I feel like we need a 2020s razor or something. If the degree of nihilism is greater than the degree of absurdity then its probably true.
DRAM manufacturers are not exactly known as the bastion of ethical behaviour though, seen they have been caught numerous times involved in the price fixing conspiracies
Cory Doctorow spoke of it in 2011 (transcript here).
Yes, but this only works if said concentrated manufacturer group also holds all IP and power means to prevent competition on the market they don't want filled.
It's like a monopoly protected by navy, something right out of 1600s, if such a state of things is established in some countries, all the others will have an advantageous route of peaceful development, except with higher risk of war and sabotage from the former group. Almost like colonial unpleasantness between Iberian monarchies on one side and England and Netherlands on the other. From the point of the former, they had the Papal blessing and divine ownership of the New World divided between them, and the latter were heretics and thieves. From the point of the latter, the former didn't have any exclusive rights to unpopulated by Europeans lands overseas. While the popular narrative (right out of Sabatini's books and such) portrays the former as bad and the latter as good, I'll notice that the former did less of racism and slavery and genocide, and their former colonies are culturally mixed unique nations. Unlike British colonies, which are all, even USA, sort of England overseas with diverged dialects.
The point is - there are legal arguments which might eventually become bigger conflicts.
So - you won't do anything to already consolidated power. This might become a new global split, in political dimension driven by economic interest. Already in testing, in fact, with Gaza and other recent conflicts. And it would be a shame if most western countries turned up on the wrong side, because that wouldn't make the other side better than it really is, but it really would have an advantage in development. You can forbid people to produce and own universal personal computers for all kinds of use only if they live under your control.
Haaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
I wish I could find the people on Reddit that called me a lunatic when I said subscription services always enshitify, NO MATTER WHAT. It's a matter of when, not if.
And this is combined with cutting Blackwell production by 40% and exacerbating a market already dominated by scalpers and AI data centers. Everything is getting enshittified, subscription just one component of it.
I've always held out for PCMR but these companies are making it near impossible - or just prohibitively expensive - to be a PC gamer.
and they just dropped support for pascal :/
Do you think Dropout will enshitify? It’s one of the best streaming services, and tons of people on the fediverse say it’s the only subscription they have. They raised their prices last year by $1, but let people keep their old price if they stay subscribed.
Is it a non-profit? No? It will enshitify.
Like every comment like yours that I have ever seen, I would bet money you didn't quite say what you are claiming to say here, didn't say it in a way that would imply the same thing, and didn't get quite the reaction you are saying you got.
Friendly reminder that there are a bunch of fantastic indie games out there that don’t have insane graphic card requirements for a smooth frame rate.
At this point I scowel at any game with higher minimum hardware requirements than fallout 4. Like, come on, did you really need all that shit?
Rent your shit, and be a slave of price changes.
When you agree to a subscription, you are enrolling to get fuck, sooner or later.
This is ultimately just punching sideways and down though.
These companies will win when your strategy is to simply shit on other people for existing.
You may not think that is what you're doing but it is. How so? Because while you care about this area of life enough to get into the details, for other people, their areas of care are completely different, and it is unreasonable for you to expect everyone to care about precisely what you care about.
As such, punching down and sideways only serves the purpose of making an environment where only the rich and powerful band together, and the poor (us) routinely infight and chop off our own legs rather than realizing that these megacorps hiring leagues of lobbyists, psychologists, marketers, etc know exactly how to push, and know that exactly the person you are bitching at will almost certainly never see your comment, or will consider it hostile and irrelevant so it wont matter either way.
What in the literal fuck are you on about. You are worried someone is going to take this comment personally, get hurt, and then run to their corporate overlords!?
That bitching about subscriptions is actually an attack on those who use the service and not a word to the wise that enshitification is coming for all your subscriptions.
I think you are taking this in perhaps the most bizarre way possible.
No. What the fuck are you on about.
Your malicious read of my pretty clear comment is so obviously absurd its like Im talking to a rage bait ai bot...
Their comment placed blame on people for simply existing in a world that is increasingly enshitified by subscriptions and my comment clearly was aimed at reaiming that blame at who deserves it rather than fighting people in the same class as you.
Says the person doing mental gymnastics to read the comment in a nonsensical way so they can be toxic about it.
You personalized this beyond all reason. There was no malicious reading just someone trying to understand what you where trying to say.
Apparently, I was dead on. You are trying to say someone that is commenting your subscriptions are going to get enshitified is somehow a personal attack rather than a statement of fact.
Clearly you are some kind of person who acts like an extremely sensitive bootlicker rather than a rational actor who is here to discuss. I would not suggest taking it personally or acting like a bootlicker in the future if you can avoid it.
Oh right, thats where the "You are worried someone is going to take this comment personally, get hurt, and then run to their corporate overlords" comes from. From you not being malicious at all.
You are obviously a troll at this point. Obviously being completely wrong in every conceivable way confirms you were actually right...
Calling someone a bootlicker for telling people that solidarity is better than inner class fighting is so absurd you being a troll is the only logical conclusion.
Given you have another comment that goes like this::
I think its pretty much confirmed you are indeed a troll.
Lol
You offered no solidarity, give me a break. You were dissing on a word to the wise under the assumption it was a personal attack due to your poor streaming choices. You are just overreacting at this point and likely every point.
Why you flail about with wild accusations is beyond me. It is probably because I am dead right that you are acting like a little bootlicker corporate clown. Solidarity, lol.
Your troll shtick doesn't work once its revealed you're a troll. You no longer enrage, you just look foolish.
I'll never game or do my general computing as a subscription to a server.
If it comes a day when I can't buy a GPU and run a game myself, I'm not going to game anymore. Simple as that.
Modern integrated GPUs have gotten pretty good lately. If it comes a day where we can't buy GPUs, we'll be able to enjoy older titles without much trouble at least...
Until the day CPUs aren't sold to you either. Just the weakest most useless little blob of silicon that's enough to connect to their servers, and then you run everything on the server.
Bold of you to assume they won't just market to the top 10%. They already make up over 55% of market trends and are steadily growing. Eventually, companies will consider it too risky or burdensome to market and sell to the bottom 90%.
And those people will also be fucked over by these companies.
Or you could just buy a used gpu that runs 10 times faster than an integrated one and doesn't overheat your CPU in CPU demanding games... Just sayin
A used gpu equivalent to an igpu is dirt cheap
emulators for the win baby!!! (assuming it's all games between snes to dreamcast) :P
Xemu does decent. I am torn on whether changing loaders has any real benefit on the emulator though. I used third party loaders back in the day on the original machine... (I miss my baby. Softmodded via MechAssault, led changes, 250Gb HDD installed. Sadly, somehow shorted it out whilst copying from a 250GB HDD to a larger one that I was going to use for more storage. Magic smoke, BIOS corrupted)
You say this, but I think most of us have offloaded formerly local computing to a server of some kind:
All these things used to be local uses of computing, and can now be accessed from low powered smartphones. Things like Chromebooks give a user access to between 50-100% of what they'd be doing on a full fledged high powered desktop, depending on the individual needs and use cases.
Almost all of my desktop usage is gaming. No, I don't think a Chromebook and a server somewhere is going to replace that for me.
I think they mean stuff like cpu and gpu processing power for games and similar? anyways have a great day and happy holiday!
those are good points though
Same but I’ll be old
100hours is quite a bit but also fuck Nvidia.
10hrs for 10 days... oops busted...
Oh dear.. I was in hospital a few weeks ago and I’ve been recovering at home. In the last two weeks I’ve manly played three games: 64 hours in the first, 50 hours in the second, and 10 hours in the third (that one was all in one day)
I’d never use a thing like GeForce Now either way, but I’d be boned hahaha
How good is hospital recovery?
Sure, there's some cons, but you basically get a free card to game relentlessly, undisturbed, and guilt-free. Tragically, you eventually heal up and have to go back to being a normie.
Oh my gawd it’s best thing. Hospital was insane but very interesting and by the time I got home I was feeling pretty awesome… my boss told me to not think about work and that he set me up for a leave of absence I still get paid for with HR. I’m treasuring every day.
Dunno, still pretty cheap for so much entertainment
Yeah that was basically my thought too. I probably do less than a quarter of that on average, but that’s not really the point. I should be allowed as much time as I want. Not that I use a Nvidia subscription anyway, but still. This makes me mad on behalf of other people.
I can't imagine this will make Nvidia much money at all. The vast, vast majority of people aren't playing more than 100 hours of videogames a month but having a tagline that you can play as much as you want is a very attractive offer to a consumer, at least to me.
Yea… 100 hours a month of your life consuming 1 form of media is… a lot.
i am the ideal customer for this type of service. i don't have a gaming computer, and I don't want to own a gaming computer, but I want to dip into new titles as they come out and indulge once in a while.
i tried geforce now and the waiting rooms and the time caps make it unusable to me. i am paying for convenience here, and yet I can't play when I want to play, and I get kicked if i play for too long or if I make a coffee. and then I wait again. im paying money to wait in a line on the internet.
im trying to sneak video games into the small amount of time that I have, and it's not letting me do that. there's actually no ideal customer for this service. it's a product that doesn't make any sense. they can suck my balls with this shit
I hear ya. You probably want something like a Steam Deck. No PC building required and it goes wherever you are.
Also the sleep function on Steam Deck is pretty good. I bring mine to work and grab some offline playtime during my 15 minute breaks, and sometimes during my 30 min lunch after i eat. No Man's Sky is chill and easy to pickup/putdown, Minecraft as well. I'm sure other titles would work as well.
Also seconding. I don't have kids but I play dad game hours: I've been playing hollowknight a few hours a week for about 6 months. Did the same with Celeste, Quake 1, FF1–6
I so badly want one but I'm saving up for a laptop (framework 12 probably) but I want it so badddddddddd
I'll only get one after I get the laptop, don't worry! :D
Aren't the waiting rooms mainly for the non-paying customers? I thought as soon as you subscribe, you jump way ahead of most other users.
Surprisingly, if they have such waiting times, it seems to indicate they do have people using the service.
If there are waiting times on a regular basis, it mostly says they under-bought hardware to service what customers they have. Which comes at the cost of future customers as people hate lines.
But, yeah, I think GeForce Now is the only cloud gaming service that didn't flop instantly. Though, with the prices listed in OP's article, the value proposition just seems really bad. They may be killing what audience they have.
Well you forget that the purpose of a subscription is just to take even more money regularly. It was never about providing a service. The fact that they’re limiting playtime shows they have insufficient hardware and have no intentions of correcting the issue. The answer is to just charge more money for the same flawed “service. “
The last time I tried it was around the skylines 2 launch and I paid for the premium whatever thing and I definitely waited a lot
Capitalism will find ways to create capital, usually ending in rents. Neither free markets nor regulated can solve this as it is rooted in a contradiction.
Capitalism has carcinisation for rent. If something stay solvent long enough, it will turn into a rent seeking subscription.
Aren't they making a shitton of money? They can't even use the usual enshittification excuses, this is just being greedy dicks.
The excuse is, and has always been, "Because we can". Never think otherwise.
There is little difference between enshitificstion and being greedy dicks.
The usual enshitification excuses are companies just being greedy dicks, and more than anything, a lack of regulation enforcement existing to stop companies simply outspending other companies out of business.
A shitton is not the amount they are aiming for. All is the goal.
I’m guessing they want to sell more computing power to AI bc they make more that way
saw this coming the second I heard about GeForce cloud gaming...never in a million years will I subscribe to play games. wow was the only exception to that rule previously, but now I just run my own server locally so even that, never again
The timing is impeccable isn’t it?
You will own nothing but you will pay for it forever.
Yup, and you won't be able to build your own PC because the same assholes pulling this shit are sucking up all the hardware resources for "AI"
HA!
Oh look a pricey solution to an issue they made, who would have seen it coming?
A giant sea bird?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rime_of_the_Ancient_Mariner
Hah thanks. I had no idea about the reference and I was like "That's a pretty weird animal to use in this context"
It's still occasionally used, but man it's an archaic reference!
What a way to basically double prices for users that actually use the service as it was promoted...
Ngreedia
You're a fucking moron if you buy Nvidia at this point and you deserve everything you lose because of it.
Wouldn't these be the total costs: base fee + overages? ($9.99+ 2*$2.99) or ($19.99 + 2*$5.99)
Not defending it, just want to correct the math
What is a GeForce Now Subscription and why would you want a subscription to your graphic card? 🤔
Basically you rent NVIDIA's GPUs, they render the games, stream to you. This way you "save" money by not having to, heyoooo what a surprise, buy cards that have been getting more and more expensive over the years because of reasons that totally have nothing to do with GPU manufacturers.
Thanks! That seems wild, I never knew that existed.
You need at least better than average internet and even then it's not the best experience.
Ignoring the GPU pricing issue, It was a really good option for Mac users to play games that don't run on MacOS. One of my friends uses it to play with our friend group.
I also used it to play higher end games because my gpu is too weak to reliably play them, but my internet is fast enough to where streaming doesn't cause any issues. (and I am not interested in paying for a gpu upgrade when I don't regularly play high end games)
Imo, if you ignore the surrounding context, it's a great option if you don't want to pay exorbitant prices for GPUs just to play a modern game.
The real issue is that this problem was artificially manufactured by the companies offering the solution and is guaranteed to enshittify in the name of greed, as seen here.
As per usual, we can't have nice things because of capitalism.
It's game streaming, except you stream an entire PC.
It's the same grift that every cloud provider does. The "You'll save money because you'll eliminate CapEx and only have OpEx instead of both!" And then they present you with numbers that look reasonable, hoping you don't do the math.
CapEx - Capital expenditure = the cost of buying the things (ownership)
OpEx - Operating expenses = cost to run things
So, yeah, you don't have to buy their overpriced $2000 GPU... you could just rent it! But renting it means you never own it, and the contract will state that the SLA will change. So they get you to sign up and then the prices change. And when your money is being dumped into the monthly bill, you are now constantly short what you'd need to buy the hardware and get yourself out of that hell. Ask anyone who's accidentally left something running in AWS and got a MASSIVE bill. Or made an API but didn't put rate limiting on it.
Get Boosteroid instead, even has a winter deal on price at the moment.
I can’t recall why, but I was tired of 3DFX. I think they had a monopoly on 3D acceleration or something, and at the time OpenGL seemed like the way to go. An unknown company called Nvidia released a card called the Riva TNT and it contributed to OpenGL becoming widely supported as well as ending 3DFX’s once deserved dominance.
Nvidia kept hitting it out of the park, creating iterations of cards that made it worthwhile to upgrade every several years. I think the competition from ATI (now AMD) may have kept them from falling into the same rut as 3DFX, and as gamers we’ve enjoyed the result of that relationship with good cards from both.
Today…Nvidia has grown into something that had shed its reason for being. It’s crazy to see their logo in business news top stories. What they’re doing, contributing to a tech development that is so far out front of government oversight that could protect people from the consequences, I see them more as a threat to society than anything else. It’s crazy.
ew! what about families/households with shared computers? what about gametesters, whose job is to play games and find bugs or streamers or game devs? this is absurd! fuck nvidia!
Forgive my ignorance, but does this mean that my gforce card performance will be degraded if I don't pay for this subscription? Why would I want to use this cloud gaming to play games I already own?
No, not if you own your own card/gaming pc. This is about their cloud gaming service where the game is run on their servers and streamed to you.
Have you ever tried it? It sounds like a ping nightmare, especially for multiplayer. You gotta wait first for the game server lag and then again while you wait for Nvidia to remotely render your draw call?
I know this service exists but it has always sounded absolutely terrible to me.
The latency is way better than you'd expect, but still noticeably worse than local. I think if you've got a decent connection and Nvidia has a server nearby it's about the same as 1 extra frame of lag (or playing on a TV without game mode...)
Never tried it and don't really want to! Been thinking the same as you. Seems like a privacy nightmare too.
Would be cool to stream my entire pc in-home though so I could get rid of all fan sounds by putting it in a closet or something, but haven't been something I've prioritised to experiment with.
Okay, thanks.
Because some people have digital libraries but no hardware to run them on.
At the very least, this is a loss in gaming accessibility by cost since a month of GeForce Now used to be a decent gaming backup for when mygaming system was down (had to RMA GPU) or a friend wanted to test the PC gaming waters.
That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.
YOU VILL OWN NOTHING, GOY!!
Some of the comments on this story sound really addicted to PC gaming.
Yea even if you're literally landlocked to Nvidia and have no other platforms / interests, I still don't get how 3 hours a day would be a problem.
Smart timing though with the kids on winter break. They're for sure getting that extra charge this month lol.
So, let's do some breakdown. Let's say 365.25 days per year. Divide by 12, that's 30.4375 days per month. 100 hours per month is 3.29 hours per day. That's almost 23 hours per week.
A reasonable person working 8-5 might get 2 hours of recreation per day during the week. That takes up 2 hours per day, 5 days a week for 10 hours during the week. That leaves 13 hours on the weekend, or 6.5 hours per day.
Realistically, that's a reasonable amount of time to play video games. On the other hand, fuck these arbitrary restrictions, play games locally.
Your definition of "reasonable" is way low I think. Especially with a lot of people working from home so their time isn't eaten up by driving anymore. I do not know a single gamer who doesn't consistently put in over 3 hours a day average. More broadly most people I know put that much time into their hobbies (many with kids).
Only 2 hours of recreation a day seems like a terrible time to me, unless you have kids, in which case I get that's how it is when they're small.
I spend like 1 hour in the morning to get ready and travel to work, then about the same to get home and have dinner. Let's say 1 hour for chores every day (though even if I do both laundry and cleaning the same day it won't take that long, and I don't do those every day.) That leaves me with at least 5 hours a day for recreation.
But weekends are 14 hours of recreation per day, not 6.5 surely? 8 hours sleep + 2 hours for some extra time to cook good food etc. and we already did most chores during the week.
I sometimes spend a weekend gaming, but most of the time many of those hours are spent on a variety of things like visiting family, sports, crafts, going downtown etc. because I like a lot of different recreation. But yeah, we can certainly agree on fuck arbitrary restrictions, and everyone should be able to own their own things. Would just be very interested to know where you are coming from with those numbers.
I can only imagine you might be in the US and a lot of it is driving? That seems to suck, I would hate to drive for hours every day :(
So you, with a family and spouse can just plop your ass in front of a computer for 14 hours in Saturday and Sunday every week without any repercussions? AND play 5 hours every day on top of that?
Teach me your ways.
I don't have a spouse, no. But in this subthread we were discussing time available for recreation in general, and I personally definitely count spending time with family as recreation.
And yes, If I'm not visiting family I do have time to sit in front of a computer for 14 hours on a Saturday, or paint, or go for a full-day biking trip, or anything else I want to do :) Why wouldn't I?
What I think some people do is take on responsibilities that they they think they "should" have, but not really appreciate the rewards of. Like cleaning their house every other day, or getting a pet, or a pool they don't want to clean and barely use, or a too big garden they don't really enjoy caring for. All those things will be worth it for some, but a burden for many others..
But that's why I'm asking, I want to verify if this is true or what else other people do when they say they don't have time to have fun and relax.
If you only get 2 hours of recreation a day then your life fucking sucks or you have shit time management skills.
God I would hate my life if I only had 2 hours of me time a day.
You sound like someone whose kids go no contact after they move out 👍🏻
6.5 hours per day every weekend does not seem reasonable or healthy to me.
Hell, if someone was exercising that much or fishing or knitting or any hobby, it wouldn’t seem healthy. Once in a while, sure. But, not every weekend.
There’s a lot of unhappy gamers downvoting us.
I long for the weekends where we spend all waking hours gaming on the C64