Another publisher has begun pulling their games from the recently launched GeForce Now streaming service. The latest publisher to make the cut is 2K Games, pulling its full lineup of games, including Borderlands 3, from GeForce Now’s library. Nvidia confirmed the news in a post to its official forums with just a few hours of notice. Nvidia did add that it will continue working with 2K Games in order to re-enable its games in the future.
Nvidia’s GeForce Now is a streaming service akin to Google Stadia. It allows subscribers to play games from their laptop, desktop, Mac, Shield TV, or Android device via Nvidia’s cloud technology. Unlike Google Stadia, GeForce Now doesn’t have its own storefront. It connects to other storefronts, including Steam and the Epic Games Store. Players still have to own the game they’re playing, but they don’t have to buy it directly from Nvidia like with Stadia.
The problem Nvidia is having is with regards to licensing. Google ensures that every game sold through Stadia is already licensed to be streamed on their service. Since GeForce Now is potentially open to thousands of games across several storefronts, it’s a much less straightforward licensing process – at least from the perspective of a customer.
A second issue for Nvidia is that it’s just fully launched GeForce Now. Previously it was in beta, where all beta users had free access to the service. In full launch, GeForce Now requires a subscription of $4.99 a month to use the service fully. It has a free tier that has extreme restrictions like only being able to play in 1-hour sessions.
2K Games’ initial licensing agreement would have to have been done during GeForce Now’s beta period. It’s unclear how that licensing agreement has changed now that GeForce Now is fully launched. It’s possible that 2K wanted GeForce Now to remain free and the subscription has caused the divide. It’s also possible that either 2K or Nvidia now want more money from the other party. Of course, sometimes these kinds of partnerships fall apart naturally.
Regardless of why 2K is deciding to end its licensing partnership with GeForce Now, it’s certainly not the only company to do so. Both Activision and Bethesda have largely removed their libraries from GeForce Now, as well as certain individual titles departing the platform, too.
It’s not that licensing disagreement doesn’t happen - that’s an understandable issue in the industry. The nature of GeForce Now simply makes these kinds of issues more awful than most. Many GeForce Now beta users likely bought games from these publishers because they don’t have PCs to run them normally. Now those people have no access to the games they bought and no recourse to get a refund. Even if a GeForce Now user hasn’t had a game they bought removed, they have to fear that spending any money might lead to it being taken away from them. Nvidia has an impossible task ahead of itself to rebuild trust with its users.
