In a blog post on March 26, NVIDIA (NVDA 3.65%) announced it would begin releasing new games for its GeForce NOW cloud gaming service every Thursday starting this week. This news comes after several major game companies pulled their games from the service recently over what appears to be a licensing issue.
Top game publishers such as Activision Blizzard, Bethesda, and Take-Two Interactive pulled their games after NVIDIA started charging for the service last month. This left GeForce NOW with a big void in its game library, especially compared to Alphabet's Google Stadia, which offers games from some of these top publishers.
Image source: NVIDIA.
Game streaming is a complicated new business
GeForce NOW allows someone to play a game they purchased without worrying about whether their PC has the graphics power to run the game. Games are streamed back to the players' computer over cloud servers equipped with high-end RTX graphics cards.
The service has been free to use, but when it came out of beta in February, NVIDIA started charging members to use a premium version of the service. That reportedly violated the licensing agreement that NVIDIA held with the game companies, which might be the reason why several game makers withdrew their games from the platform.
However, this could be just a temporary problem. In a forum post, NVIDIA said it is working with Take-Two to bring its games back to the platform. As of Feb. 20, GeForce NOW offered over 1,500 games.
NVIDIA's cloud gaming platform has received a ringing endorsement from founder and CEO of Epic Games, the maker of the popular Fortnite free-to-play shooter, who posted on Twitter that the service is "the most developer-friendly and publisher-friendly of the major streaming services."
