Just over a year ago, NVIDIA finally got GeForce NOW, its PC games service, out of beta. With the commercial launch of the service, two levels were introduced: a feature and a time-limited free level, and a paid founder level that offers a full range of features (including RTX) and priority access. As the company has been operating the commercial service for the second year in a row, NVIDIA today increased the price for GeForce NOW-paid subscriptions and actually doubled it 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 were advertised as a limited offer from the beginning, will eventually be retired and will no longer be offered to new customers. In their place, the company launches a new range of “Priority” memberships, which are otherwise identical to the old Founders plans, offering the same features and priority access.
The only significant change, other than the name on the plan, is the price. While the Founders plans were $ 5 per month or $ 25 for a six-month subscription, GeForce NOW Priority subscriptions will be sold monthly or annually. Monthly plans are now $ 10 per month (or more specifically $ 9.99), while annual plans are $ 100 ($ 99.99).
With that said, thanks to their founding members – and no doubt mindful of the public’s negative reaction to price increases – NVIDIA is also working on the old founders’ tariff for existing customers according to what they call their “Founders for Life” benefit. . This means that while new customers will have to pay the new, higher prices, existing customers will have their old prices locked up, as long as they stay in what NVIDIA calls ‘good status’. Which for all practical purposes constitutes a 50% discount on the service for existing members.
Beyond that, NVIDIA’s blog post announcing the price increase does not go into detail about the reason for the increase. But it’s not very surprising to see NVIDIA raise prices; even without the explicit limited time of the founding packages, $ 5 / month probably does not cover all NVIDIA costs, especially as evidenced by the price of comparable high-end institutions from the major cloud service providers. If nothing else, this is a sign that NVIDIA is finally looking for a real profit from the service, rather than just trying to cover the cost.
Overall, NVIDIA looks quite positive about the future of their unique cloud gaming service, even with the licensing-related teething problems over the past year and the hit to claim that will undoubtedly come from a price increase. According to the company, they are continuing to add capacity to the service, including building a data center in Montreal later this year. Similarly, the company continues to expand its GeForce NOW Alliance partnerships to other countries, further increasing the number of countries that have local GeForce NOW servers.
Finally, although today’s news is largely focused on the business side of the service, NVIDIA does mention that an upcoming update of the service will address the refresh rate synchronization. With the 2.0.28 update, the refresh rate on the server side will be set to match the refresh rate on the client so as to take into account the existence of both 60Hz screens and 59.94Hz screens. This small discrepancy in refresh rates is not a problem with games locally, but similar to streaming video, it can be a problem with cloud games, as a wrong match will result in a judge and occasionally a fake framework.