After reading details (FAQ), it seems that the ads won't be too intrusive. I think it won't bother me too much, and if it really helps improving the QoL for free users, then so be it, I guess.
Reminds me of Discord's situation. A niche platform, entirely free of use and ad-free, suddenly got super popular due to circumstances (Covid and stuff). Can't afford to run the infrastructure anymore, but want to remain independent (turned down a huge offer from Microsoft), so they now become more and more insistent with getting people to get a Nitro subscription.
Since the paid plans for GeForce NOW only offer small improvements, users aren't enough incentivized to get them. But it got more and more popular recently (over the past year or two), and not so many people are getting the paid plans. Ads are the alternative, I guess. Yet another really nice service made less nice by its popularity... :/
Also, forgot to mention. My biggest concern with this right now is not so much the ads themselves (max. 2 minutes during the queue, tbh it's fine and kind of fair and justified), but going from "no ads" to "a little bit of ads" is quite a huge first step, and we don't know where it could lead to.
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These are just my personal views and opinions on the subject, which is why I put them here and not in the original post.
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never heard of it but but anything free always has ads to help the cost
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It never had ads ever since launch, it was supported by its paid tiers (less queue time, higher quality, etc).
But since a year or two it got more and more popular, so tons of people are playing on the free plan. Paid plans aren't enough to support the service anymore...
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https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/faq/
Now has quite a few questions/answers involving the term "ads".
You can change to your language if available by changing the URL accordingly. Examples:
German: https://www.nvidia.com/de-de/geforce-now/faq/
Spanish: https://www.nvidia.com/es-es/geforce-now/faq/
French: https://www.nvidia.com/fr-fr/geforce-now/faq/
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Kind of. I would have understood in some other contexts, but in this one I personally think it's a bit over the top. 🤔
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The irony of your first sentence describing yourself better than the change of service you are complaining about is tragically lost on you.
Edit:
Your edit is just adding more irony. "Deal with it" is hilarious considering how you deleted your initial comment - because you couldn't deal with the feedback you received. 😂
Superb entertainment value!
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Here's the official English email btw
You are receiving this email because you are a GeForce NOW free user.
The GeForce NOW free membership provides unparalleled gaming value by allowing users to game on a GeForce PC at no cost. To help provide ongoing support for the free service, starting March 5, 2024, members will experience up to two minutes of video sponsorship messages before each free gaming session while in queue. We anticipate that this change will reduce average wait times for free users over time. In preparation for this update, users will see an updated end user license agreement as early as today.
To game without video ads, members can upgrade to a Priority or Ultimate membership. In addition to an ad-free experience, our premium memberships include RTX graphics, the fastest access to gameplay, and longer session lengths. The Ultimate membership delivers the highest resolution and frame rates in the cloud – up to 4K at 120 FPS or 240 FPS with Reflex for ultra-low latency gaming.
Questions? Contact NVIDIA customer care for additional information, or check out our FAQ.
Thank you for streaming with NVIDIA GeForce NOW.
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"Nvidia as a small struggling upstart simply can't afford to subsidize a technology they don't believe in." - Gamers Nexus
(camera shows two trillion market valuation)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWmq9DH3y_Q
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Not sure to understand.
Is the person's quote sarcasm, specifically the "can't afford" part, while showing a chart saying they can very much afford a lot of things?
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So, meaning "ads are just to get even more money than they already have", and since someone already said it, the user quoted the video?
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I'd say it acknowledges the fact that the service GFN itself might not be profitable (enough) anymore, but says that Nvidia as a company has more than enough resources to fund this kind of service anyways if they wanted to (hence the word "subsidize"), not least due to ethically questionable behaviour towards customers, partners and competitors, which was and is only possible due to their dominant role in the market.
I haven't watched the video myself but I am assuming it's a quote from it.
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I quoted Tim Burke, editor-in-chief of Gamers Nexus arguably one of the most influential tech channels on YT. If Nvidia wanted they could make Geforce Now available at no charge for the next millennia given their 2 trillion=2.000.000.000.000 (!) USD market capitalization and their profits.
Of course it's sarcasm. I thought this would be obvious from the start by calling Nvidia "a small struggling upstart" when it is in fact one of the three most valuable companies on the planet.
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I see. I think I only heard a bit of Gamers Nexus, so I thought it was just some random tech YTber, lol.
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They are clearly just trying to push people to use the paid tier instead of the free tier.
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How will the poor shareholders get the valuation to 3 trillion if not by ads... Think of the poor people!
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Agreed, we can't have those nasty freeloaders chipping away at the already meager profits one hour at a time;)
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If it makes queue waiting times actually shorter, I'm all in. I'm waiting hours in queue anayways, they could play 30 minutes of ads and I wouldn't be watching them anyways
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Even if they have a detection if the queue screen is the active window? (Don't know if it has just curious about your take).
I don't know what it was anymore, might be a programme or something else entirely.
But there was something that I had running in the background while I was watching other stuff in the past.
At some point there where changes made and the programme automatically went to the pause menu the moment you tabbed out defeating the point of having it run in the background.
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Uhm good question, I don't think I'd mind that either. I have a shit laptop, never had a good setup, so it's my only chance to play good looking/recent/AAA games, or even just old badly optimised indies.
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Same here (for both of your messages), though because of the huge queue times recently I use it mostly to get login rewards/redeem codes and stuff for games I rarely play so I don't need to download them just for that. I used to play a lot on GFN, but the QoL has quite decreased for me. :/ Hopefully this makes it better.
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For now the length of the ads is supposedly capped at 2 mn but let's be real, if they uncap it, chances are the queues are going to get longer to get you to see more ads, not shorter.
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I'm positive, when they say queue times will get shorter "over time", I read it as "as we make more money, we'll buy more rigs for you to use"
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That would be logical but at the same time, if the queues get shorter, why would anyone pay to have priority and by pass queues?
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For the same reason they always do: better graphics, longer sessions, 0 queue time, or close to, settings not reset after each session.
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I really hate ads, if only there was some way to enjoy this service without them
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I do hate ads, but I'm aware one can pay for a premium ad-free experience. It is nice of them to provide a free version. Ads likely do not cover the costs of the service that is being provided, but rather reduces the amount of money lost. It also convinces people to upgrade to a paid subscription. I don't see this as a problem and I think talking about this change will make more people aware that this service exists, therefore increasing the number of free and paid accounts. If people don't like the ads they can upgrade or stop using the service, both of which makes the service more profitable for Nvidia
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Ah, I see. Yeah, I pretty much feel the same about it.
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Updated the OP with a pop-up message displayed when launching the client.
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Hm. I had no problem with the ads but the data sharing is a nope for me.
Guess it was fun while it lasted.
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I don't mind non-personalized ads... But I don't like companies saving and processing my data just to show me "personalized" ads that I won't be looking at anyway.
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I love how they say they'll share personal data... and only mention your IP. As if your IP was going to help their "partners" give you ads that are "relevant to your interests". Yeah they also need to know your interests but it's not as cool to say their partners will then leave cookies in your browser to stalk your every day activity and keep that data stored forever.
I guess there is an opt-out (hopefully not just for Euros) so that's something already.
The price of the first tier is honestly not that big of a deal. It's a service they provide and yeah it got more popular in recent years due to GPU prices so they are overwhelmed and trying to cope, I get it. Better that than saying "it'll be a paying service from now on" I guess.
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Refer to https://www.steamgifts.com/go/comment/7EK03TK for the opt-out
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I mean, IP gives location, so they won't give you ads for a product sold in Country A if you live in Country B. I guess. They did say it's among other things though, not just the IP ("including").
Anyways yeah, you can just opt out as WaxWorm pointed out. 😅
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Huh, didn't know they had a free plan and it was ad-free until now.
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Yup, me neither. Wish I had known earlier, it appears convenient to quickly try a game without wearing out your SSD for it 👀
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quickly try a game
Depends. Recently waiting times were massive for me, but apparently not for everyone. https://www.steamgifts.com/go/comment/pqM10kG
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Indeed. Maybe I got lucky yesterday or maybe you get prioritized for your first try, but today I've joined the queue like 5h ago and still have 100 people in front of me :s
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I think it also depends on the game... A month or two ago I had 3 sessions back to back on Bloodhunt, with literally 2 seconds between clicking play and loading a session, which is like, just the loading animation time. But the next day, I tried Rocket League... Man. Started queuing in the morning, got to play at night. More than 10 hours of queue. :')
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I think it's not available in all regions, and in some regions they removed it for new users.
Also, the plans are a bit different in SEA and I forgot where else, where it's a third-party partner that provides the service, not Nvidia themselves.
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Yeah, that's probably it. I would hear it if it had a free tier in my region I guess. Though nonetheless I still don't have the required internet for it, that's another thing. :)
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personal data processing that you can not opt out of unless you go for a paid plan
It says in the text you've posted:
If you do not wish to have this data processed for personalized advertising, please select a paid tier of GeForce NOW or opt-out of personalized advertising in our Privacy Center.
So log in and go here (you can change the language the same way I described in my FAQ comment):
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/account/email-preferences/
and untick the boxes like this and click "Submit" afterwards:
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I use ultimate myself but if I didn't have the money or even a decent computer i still think its a nice thing to be able to play several games in the cloud and yes i dont like commercials but if i didn't have the ultimate tier still being able to play cyberpunk on a less than average computer is quite enjoyable for me at least not even having to mention no downloads. This is just my experience with Geforce Now. But if it wasn't for geforce now i wouldn't have bought cyberpunk and baldurs gate 3 and many other games as i wouldn't be able to play them. 200 euro's a Year is decent compared to a full rig nowadays [if you pay for ultimate] [ultimate doesnt have commercials]
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To each their own, I suppose... 200€ a year is quite a lot to me. I have some friends that got really good gaming laptops (refurbished, practically new) for 3 years' worth of GFN Ultimate (600€ for an RTX 3060). If I were to spend money on one of those, I'd rather save for the PC... But, well. I have a barely decent Internet connection, so paying to get "higher quality" that I won't see on my 144-720p stream is pointless to me. I can get the appeal for people with fiber or something, though.
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I dont have fiber myself sadly but yeah each his own the way i see it is like even if i save up to 10 yrs of Geforce 2000 euro's i would still not have the best computer to play on 4080 quality i dont have to download stuff and i can play anywhere i want pretty much on laptop phone or desktop and starting up a game is just seconds ;p
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I forgot I made this thread. Yesterday I finally got my first ad when queuing, lol (this thread was 2 months ago).
It was an ad for a McDonald's fries event on their app... US-only. I'm in Europe. lol
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At the moment they have nice promo 50% off for 1 month or for 6 months.
However, I am not sure how to make sure they do not bill you full amount after promo period. Wording is a bit not clear, seems like if you cancel right away (so as not to forget canceling), they will give you back money instead of canceling after promo period you payed for.
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I had a 6 month deal before and cancelled a couple of weeks before it ended because I wanted to take a break from gaming to finish my paper anyway. I got to keep the remaining time that I paid for. I have a mac, so use it to play some games that are windows only. Or to play games that have big downloads that I don't want on my machine.
You really shouldn't forget if you're using GFN regularly. Just keep track of the month that it ends and cancel before the next payment date.
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What the title says.
I just received an information email from Nvidia saying that GeForce NOW will start implementing ads to free plan users starting March 5, 2024, which is roughly 4 days from now depending on your time zone. I didn't find any blogpost about this on their website, so I suppose it's only being emailed to users for now. Questions regarding the matter have however been added to their FAQ page (thanks WaxWorm).
You can opt out of targeted ads (you will still get ads, just not personalized) in your account preference settings (thanks again WaxWorm).
Below is a copy of their email.
translated by DeepL because I somehow keep on getting emails in my local language instead of English as per my settings. The translation is accurate, though if for some reason you want to discuss wording it might be better to find someone that got the English email.Now is the original English email, thanks refat17.I also just started GFN for the first time since I made this post, this is the pop-up message I got. Used OCR on a screenshot as I couldn't select the text, but it's accurate.
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