You may have read a bunch of articles about the summer “Geforce Now” sale. 29.99$ for 6 months, an advertised “Summer of Gaming”. Hurrah!! As someone who has been streaming curious for a few years, I was intrigued by this offer of a “Summer of Gaming” for just 30 smackers. I currently use moonlight to connect my beloved Thinkpad T480S running Fedora to my windows gaming PC to stream games to the couch. Moonlight is an excellent piece of software that I use extensively, I had read that it was originally based off of the now defunct Nvidia Gamestream service, so maybe Nvidia’s current streaming service offering would be just as good, grown from the same roots.
I received a backbone controller for my android phone when I switched mobile carriers to Verizon via a giftcard to their store, so I have dabbled with phone gaming and some Xbox cloud streaming, but it has been a while. I have also done some xbox and moonlight streaming to my steam deck. The steam deck is awesome, and it works just like a console when docked. (I use this JSAUX dock and an 8bitdo controller) Unfortunately as the deck is about 3 years old, and it wasn’t super powerful to begin with, it doesn’t have the grunt to play a lot of the newest titles. Monster Hunter Wilds was the first game in my library where this lack in gaming horsepower hit home. I didn’t even bother trying to install it to the deck, it can barely run on the current gen consoles, and I had to buy a new GPU to get it to run on my PC, the plucky lil’ deck never stood a chance.
This is why Nvidia’s “Geforce Now” game streaming app feels like it can enhance the capability of my Steam Deck. They just released a linux app focused on the Steam Deck, making the experience of playing Geforce now on that device relatively seamless. Unfortunately, this app only works on the steam deck, and none of the other tasty flavors of linux. Nvidia, work on this! Geforce now is a tiered service, where you can go from free to play with ads (yuck), 10$ a month for the “RTX enhanced” tier, or 20$ a month for the “Ultimate” tier. Each tier has its own features better than the previous, and it is fairly complicated to compare between the various tiers. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/memberships/
I knew when I purchased the service that the “premium” tier, which is currently on sale for 30$ for 6 months, it would limit gaming session lengths to 6 hours. This hardly feels like an issue, I can’t remember the last time I spent 6 hours in one sitting playing a game. I was probably in a Mountain Dew and cheetos induced haze, but those days are behind me. What I didn’t know is that the service caps you to 100 hours a month, with 15 hours rolling over. I guess I don’t know how much I will end up using the service, but it certainly seems that 100 hrs/month of gaming wouldn’t be enough for a heavy user. With that limitation, that service can’t be a complete replacement for a gaming PC or console, but more of a supplement. If you expect to game 3 hours a day, on average, including heavier usage weekends, that gets close to 100 hours in one month.
With that preamble out of the way, let’s get to impressions of the service. With the specter of the global pandemic in the rear-view mirror, I, like many, have been called to return to the office. This is only “part time” at the moment, but I am sure that we will all be back into our cubicles full time in a few years. Why let people work the way they want? We gotta “collaborate”! Water cooler talk! Commutes, everyone loves those. We simply, cannot have nice things. But, I digress.
I was on lunch break at the office, If I was at home, I would typically use this time to eat quickly and take a nap, or play some video games while scarfing down a turkey and swiss. You want me back in the office? I am going to enjoy my lunch break even if you are making me put on pants.
Geforce Now to the rescue??
I packed my trusty backbone controller in my work bag, and headed off in to the office. I could write for paragraphs about the enshittification of the Backbone controller and the entire subscription ecosystem they are trying to force on users, but it still works well if you ignore all that, has a headphone jack and charting port, and just works. Can’t complain too much. They have a pro version out now, but the price is quite hefty at 170$ bucks.
The time -11:48, the ham and swiss sandwich – consumed. Time to game. I pop on the Geforce Now phone app, and it takes a bit for it to link to all of my owned game libraries, but that is surprisingly easy. It appears that it is just working with the various storefronts and the Geforce API, Steam, Xbox, Ubisoft, EA, Epic Games were all set up fairly quickly. As I don’t have a ton of time to game during my break, and I am worried about my co-workers giving me the stink eye, I decide to play something that will be easy to drop in and out of. Hmmm… Forza Horizon 5. That new Mario Kart World game (review incoming) buzz had people online talking about Forza Horizon games, so I was hankering for an open world racer. I never finished Forza Horizon 5, I could drop in do a race or two and hop out in 20 minutes. Perfect. Let’s, as Mario would say, a go.
Ok, so.. Hm… logging in, it says that there is a 35 person queue. That doesn’t seem ideal. The Geforce Now terms did warn me that there could be “queue times” even with the paid sub, but I would have shorter queue times. The premium paid sub still also mentioned queue times, but they get the shortest. Well, I was hoping to play the game now.. Not later, I only have so much time in my lunch break. I guess I have to wait, maybe it will go fast.
Ok… so… this sure is taking a while. It is also fairly annoying that my phone keeps going to sleep which shuts the screen off, so I have to awkwardly unlock the phone with my fingerprint sideways with the controller attached. This service should at least keep the screen from turning off when you are waiting in queue. I got the dang thing plugged in! I guess.. let’s give the power of RTX just a bit more time.
12:00. Ok, lets just check the queue, it’s been about 12 minutes…. 25 people ahead of me. 10 people got in in about 12 minutes, so doing some math, this is about a 40 minute wait time to get into a game? People are supposed to be doing this mobile? Gaming on the go? I think a 40 minute wait is about the length of the average commute, and is almost my entire lunch break. OK, this is basically impossible to use in this state. Lunch break is already about half over, what can I do? I MUST GAME! I brought the backbone in to the office and everything! Risking the humiliation of being outed as a gamer to my co-workers, and I don’t even get to burn any rubber? Very uncool. Wait a minute, I suppose Forza Horizon 5 is an Xbox game, and the Xbox has cloud streaming, so… that will work right?
Xbox Cloud Streaming
This is the O.G. streaming service in my experience. (Ok, not the real O.G. I used Onlive back in the day, rest in peace you beautiful bastard) I have used Xbox cloud gaming before, and was mildly impressed with the results. It is a fairly cool service, allowing you to play games right away rather than installing them. This works seamlessly on the Xbox series X. It is a nifty way to try out a game without having to wait for the entire 60+ GB install to download. With the puny 1 TB SSD on the Xbox, I need to be judicious about what is “sponge-worthy” of my Xbox’s hard drive space.
I also “installed” the Xbox cloud streaming interface on my steam deck. Install is in quotes because the installation is just creating a hacky way for the steam deck to point to the Microsoft game pass streaming website, where the service streams over the chromium powered browser. I don’t think it requires you to download Edge onto your steam deck, but eww. There is something unholy about installing edge on a Linux OS. That streaming solution worked alright, especially as a way to play my Xbox library on the Steam Deck without having to use heroic launcher and a proton based windows emulation layer. It worked really well, streaming looked fine and the input latency wasn’t that bad, and the battery life savings is pretty nice . This previous streaming experience was all done over my wired or wireless 1 gig fiber internet at home. How would this work over 5G at my work desk?
In short, poorly.
I have Xbox Gamepass ultimate, and with that subscription, “beta” cloud gaming is included, but I haven’t booted it up on my phone in ages. I then proceed to spend around 10 minutes trying to figure out how the fuck to play using gamepass. The Backbone app is connected to the xbox streaming service, but the website it opens for me won’t let me login. Ok… that is borked. Well, I can just open the Xbox app I installed a while ago. After some awkward portrait mode navigation with the controller attached to my phone, I successfully navigate to the app and open that bitch up.
The Xbox app has the ability to see my games, and do streaming from my console sitting in my entertainment center, but there is no option for cloud streaming. I guess the cloud streaming stuff must have moved elsewhere. There is also another Gamepass app installed on my phone, so I figure the cloud streaming must be in there. I open the “cloud app” only to realize there is not an app anymore, and the “gamepass” app is deprecated.
Ok…. uhh… which one? I try the one on the right.
…. O.K.
So, it is telling me to go back to the app that didn’t let me stream games. Whatever, you can stream via the web browser, so I go to xbox.com/play, it finally lets me log in, and after about 90% of my lunch break has been consumed, I am ready to play a game.
12:08, I finally get logged in, and Xbox cloud streaming gets me into the game within a minute of opening the app. Though, I use the term “in game” loosely. Before I can actually play I have to sit through assloads of ads for every single DLC that has ever existed for this game. Just let me fucking play the game!After a few minutes of ads, which I am not really exaggerating, I finally got into my vehicle, and plugged in a nearby race into the Forza GPS and started my drive.
Ok, things are just a little dicey en route to the race. I am getting pretty significant freezes every 30 seconds or so. This isn’t just lag, but real deal no fooling 1-2 seconds of video freeze. This video freeze almost always ends with the video resuming with my car in a wall, or a tree. It would be dangerous to race like this, but I tell myself that maybe the streaming is buffering and it will resolve when I get into a race and out of the open world. I started the race and… it was unplayable, those 1-2 second hangs every 30 seconds or so made it quite difficult to stay on track, I came in 12th, which is last. I sort of got the hang of blind driving after a couple laps, but it was too late.
What is my reward after the race? I get an ad to buy Forza Horizons 5 premium for 45$ through an unskippable ad. Is this a mobile game? Wtf? I guess I am on my phone, but this sort of advertising in a game I am paying for feels a bit shitty. This is probably exacerbated by the fact that I haven’t logged in in years, so there is a backlog of stuff to sell me.
Game Over
At this point, I was defeated. Lunch break time is now over, and I spent most of it fighting login screens and queues. These services promise a magical ability to game on “RTX Anywhere” or make any device into an Xbox, but the tech just isn’t there yet. That is my impression based on this single lunch break session of gaming.
I will be fair and try out this service again, in some different usage cases. Geforce Now was advertised as a way to get more power out of your Steam Deck, as that device has trouble playing some of the more demanding titles that have come out. I am trying to get through the story of Monster Hunter Wilds, and it would be nice to play that on my Steam Deck and T.V. rather than playing on my PC. I also have a few non gaming laptops that could become gaming devices via streaming, so I will give that a shot as well.
Stay tuned!