Okay, saying that GeForce NOW, NVIDIA’s game streaming service, is one year old may be a bit puzzling, as we’ve been talking about it for much longer than that. So the first thing is to specify that when I talk about its first year, I’m referring to the time that has elapsed since it came out of its beta phase, where it was only accessible by invitation. One year ago today, the service became available to all users in certain geographies.
GeForce NOW turns one year old and reaches 6 million users
A birthday is always a good time to take stock, and it seems that GeForce NOW’s balance sheet is quite positive, since in these twelve months it would have reached six million users. It is true that NVIDIA does not indicate the ratio between paid and free accounts, but even so, and given the speed at which the monthly subscriptions to the founder’s mode have been running out, it is not unreasonable to think that NVIDIA’s expectations for the service must be being fulfilled.
Other notable numbers from this first year of GeForce NOW are the 175 million hours streamed, that its catalog of compatible games already exceeds 800 and that its coverage is becoming more global every day, currently, the service is already available in more than 65 countries.
For those who are still not too clear about what this service consists of, GeForce NOW allows us to play through the cloud, running the games on NVIDIA servers. Unlike Stadia, and this is important, GeForce NOW is not a game store, it is not possible to buy titles from this service. What it does is to connect to the libraries of Steam, Epic Store, and recently also GOG, and offer access to the games that the user has and that are supported by the service, a list that you can consult here.
A very interesting aspect of GeForce NOW is precisely what I mentioned before, its free accounts, which allow you to test its operation, and that, for many users, maybe enough to meet their needs. Its main limitation is that each game session can have a maximum duration of one hour, and depending on the number of users connected to the service, sometimes you have to wait a few minutes to start playing. The founder’s mode does not have these limitations and, also, offers ray tracing in all the games that have it.
As we told you a few days ago, GeForce reaches this date releasing its beta version for Google Chrome, as well as its app with native support for Apple M1, and NVIDIA has announced that in the coming days it has prepared some surprises and offers for subscribers of the service (both those with free accounts and founders), as well as some contests and sweepstakes in their social networks, in which it will be possible to get prizes like a Steel Series Arctis Pro wireless headset and Razer Kishi controllers to play with the smartphone.
