I don’t really understand this though. I bought the games. What does a publisher have to say about where and or how I play them afterwards? If Nvidea wants to provide me with a cloud computer at a certain price then they should have any say in that.
Agreed. I'm highly disappointed that Nvidia rolled over so easily, with zero resistance. They should have told the publishers to pound sand, as what they're doing is nothing like Stadia or Game Pass. They're just letting me play games I purchased from the comfort of my own couch, as far as I'm concerned.
Nvidia is highly dependent on the game publishers making sure their games work well with Nvidia cards. The whole "best played on Nvidia" thing would fall apart if publishers stopped working with them. Unfortunately, this leads to them being unable to be more of an opponent here.
A third party would need to sue them or the government would have to introduce legislation to stop this bullshit. I'm not hopefully that either will happen in the near future, which is sad. Compared to e.g. Stadia Geforce Now has the far more customer friendly business model.
Nvidia has like 85% of the market share for discrete cards. Releasing a game that doesn't work with Nvidia cards in the PC game space would mean flushing your entire release and all your publishers money. Nobody on earth is withholding support for Nvidia as a bargaining chip in the PC gaming space.
The actual issue is vastly more trivial copyright makes it easy to forbid such and even if present license didn't forbid it then fighting in court would be as expensive as it is pointless because license v2 would certainly do the job. The only path forward is via willing cooperation.
> Nvidia has like 85% of the market share for discrete cards. Releasing a game that doesn't work with Nvidia cards in the PC game space would mean flushing your entire release and all your publishers money. Nobody on earth is withholding support for Nvidia as a bargaining chip in the PC gaming space.
Nvidia has that market share because Nvidia has a very big team doing nothing but working either directly with game developers or on pre-release versions of games (provided by the publishers) to make sure that the games work perfect on their cards from day one. No one needs to release a game that doesn't work on Nvidia cards, just not providing that access would be incredible damaging for Nvidia and Nvidia knows that.
The problem is that you are fabricating this picture of the world from whole cloth with no corroborating evidence and it doesn't even make sense. Who would threaten to sabotage their own entire operations in the PC space and why would they do that instead of relying on copyright and licensing which trivially provide a means to achieve the same ends.
If Call of Duty N doesn't have terms in its license that forbid NVIDIA's use case the best case scenario for NVIDIA would be fighting a protracted and expensive legal battle to establish this meanwhile Call of Duty N+1 includes slightly different wording that clearly establishes this limitation.
There is no need for coercion its clear as day that the only reasonable path forward for NVIDIA is willing collaboration with manufacturers.
Basically stop spinning stories to explain what is already trivially explicable.
>I bought the games. What does a publisher have to say about where and or how I play them afterwards?
That's where you're wrong: You never "bought" the game, you only bought a license to use the game in so-and-so location under so-and-so conditions as dictated by whoever published and "sold" you the game.
We can have an entire discussion on the merits of buying a product vs. buying a license granting you rights to use a product, but point of the matter is you never bought the game. Not even back during the CD-ROM In A Physical Box days.
You didn't buy them though, you bought a license to play them under specific circumstances. If you bought them, then you would have the right to play the same game on a different OS or game system. Can you buy a game on PC and play the Xbox version? Nope. It doesn't surprise me that they want to stay on the good side of the publishers and not risk a legal battle.
Don't mistake this as me endorsing this regime. I'm just explaining the reality of the situation.
Yes, and I bought a license that allows me to play them on any machine that has Steam installed. Whether it’s a machine I bought, or one that I rent from AWS or Google. Why is renting a PC from Nvidea any different?
I find it unlikely that the license agreement and AUP of steam, and in addition of the game you purchased, which might have its own stipulations, is that simple and open.
Feel free to supply evidence to the contrary though. I would be happy to be wrong.
At some point we're going to have to stop letting EULAs and other click-through contracts supersede basic consumer rights. For example, when/why did we lose the right to resell stuff we bough?
> in addition of the game you purchased, which might have its own stipulations
Since I don’t see any additional agreements when I buy/play the game on steam it seems unlikely there is one.
It seems the steam license agreement only allows you to make non-commercial use of paid games. I can imagine that Nvidia just didn’t want to go into the battle of whether pre-installing steam content that (other) users have already paid for constitutes a violation of that provision.
Could be that the service provider doesn't want to delete the game files when you log out, then reinstall the game from steam on a different computer in their network when you sign on next time. In fact, doing so would probably ruin the experience.
