Not waiting for GeForce Later —

Weeks after launch, Nvidia’s GeForce Now attracts a million streaming gamers

But that number likely includes a lot of free trial lookie-loos.

A million gamers are part of GeForce Now now.
Enlarge / A million gamers are part of GeForce Now now.

Nvidia announced this week that over a million people have signed up to use GeForce Now to stream games from Nvidia's central servers. The announcement comes just a couple of weeks after Nvidia first opened the service up to the general public.

Those user numbers were no doubt helped by the presence of GeForce Now's free service tier, which limits rendering quality and restricts play sessions to a single hour. Subscribers for the paid version of the service are also currently inside a free 90-day "introductory period"—it's unclear how many of those trial users will continue to pay $5 a month once it expires.

Those caveats aside, the quick trip to a million users represents a strong start for Nvidia's entry into an increasingly crowded streaming gaming field. For context, Sony reported a million subscribers for its $60/year PlayStation Now streaming service as of last November, almost five years after it launched. Google hasn't discussed user numbers for Stadia, but there are some early signs that not many early adopters are even making use of the platform's free games (though the company did have trouble satisfying all its initial pre-orders late last year).

GeForce Now's wider launch comes after a lengthy closed beta period where the company says 300,000 users logged over 70 million streaming hours on the service. GeForce Now currently supports hundreds of games across Steam, Epic Games Store, EA's Origin, and Ubisoft's uPlay, all of which can be purchased individually and played via traditional download or remote streaming. Nvidia says there are already 1,500 additional games publishers have submitted to an "onboarding queue" for addition to the service in the future.

Activision Blizzard abruptly removed its titles from GeForce Now last week. Nvidia later took the blame for that state of affairs, saying it was due to a "misunderstanding" over the length of a beta partnership agreement. "Recognizing the misunderstanding, we removed [Activision Blizzard]'s games from our service, with hope we can work with them to re-enable these, and more, in the future," Nvidia said in a statement.

Channel Ars Technica