 Hey before I get into this video I want to remind you to enter our animal crossing new horizons giveaway. All you have to do is like this video, comment below, subscribe to the channel and hit that bell icon that will get you one entry into the giveaway. You can do that every single day. Obviously you can't subscribe to the bell icon every day but you can like and comment on every video all the way through the March 18th to get additional entries. The winner will be announced on March 19th. It will be a digital copy so I can literally give it away worldwide. So good luck and I'll see you on the other side of the intro. Hey everyone. I wanted to make a different video today. You know I often talk about Switch or PlayStation or Xbox, occasionally PC gaming but this is about the future of game streaming whether it's through XCloud, Google Stadia, GeForce Now, Amazon, Google, whatever companies like Nintendo and Sony get into it as well. Sony's kind of into it for the retro library but if they go beyond that. I'm very curious where the future streaming is going because I've been beating the drum for a couple years now that I think streaming is the future of video games. But with what's happening with GeForce Now, it's bringing up some issues that I hadn't considered in the past and it's making me wonder if the industry itself is going to kind of fold in and it's actually going to keep video game hardware like Switch or PlayStation 5 and all that stuff relevant for even longer for consumers as they become maybe the most consumer friendly way to play games and you might be like how's the consumer friendly to have to buy a separate device for gaming versus just you know gaming on your phone or on your smart TV or devices you already have through game streaming. Well let's look at what's happening with GeForce Now. So first up what is GeForce Now? This is the official website, The Power to Play. You scroll down here, legendary GeForce Cloud Gaming so it's a cloud gaming service. Your games on your devices so you could you know it's about the games you already own. So here's how it works. Connect to your favorite stores and stream your library of games. You make your purchases on your personal store account you know Steam, good old games, etc. And the games will always stay with you so you own the games entirely. You don't have to keep using GeForce Now service to keep using those games just log in to Steam download on your computer, etc. Share the wins. For massive wins, epic fails, all your best in game moments are automatically saved with NVIDIA highlights and easily shared with the world. That's just like having a mod feature on your computer that's not a huge deal but it's kind of cool. Join GeForce Now and start playing for free or upgrade your membership for faster access to our cloud gaming service and extended gameplay sessions. So basically you can use GeForce Now for free or you can you know get slightly better service if you pay. So the idea is obviously cloud gaming on all of your devices. That's the idea. Grab your game instead of having to install and everything you can play it on anything whether it's your iMac, your laptop, your TV, that's one of those NVIDIA shield TVs right there that uses the Switch, take our X1 or on your smart device. It's cool. You know, five bucks a month. Use your priority access, extended session length, RTX on so you get to turn RTX on and use RTX visuals. You get a free 90 day introduction period so you don't even have to pay for the first three months. You only get one hour session lengths on GeForce Now which might be fine for people who are just going to game on their phone quick, you know, only having an hour at a time to play. I don't think it's a huge deal for some people but obviously you want, you know, the past only five bucks a month. It's a pretty good deal. You create your quality app like your game library. So what this service does is it allows you to play games you already own on anything you own. Let's just say as an example, you know, I want to play Witcher 3, Mac settings, Hairworks on, 4K, blah, blah, blah. But I don't really have the hardware to do that and I don't right now. How can I get that enjoyment? Well, through GeForce Now, you just stream the game from their servers and, you know, however fast my internet goes is going to determine on how well that game is performing on my platform in terms of resolution and frame rate. So the thing is, I have a business line internet in my house so that seems like a really viable option to me and, you know, feedback from GeForce Now is that it actually does work really well. It works better than Google Stadia does. So kudos, like, you know, Nvidia got something right. But here is where the issue is. You're playing games you already own. You're just playing it on someone else's computer and streaming it to your stuff. But this is happening. So we have 2K is removing their games from access on there. Even though you own the games, by the way, these are games you own. You can't use GeForce Now to play them. Activision, Blizzard games are leaving GeForce Now, Bethesda games are leaving GeForce Now. These are three major companies just saying, hey, look, you can't play your games on GeForce Now. And you might be wondering, well, what's the issue with playing games you already own? Because in the most pro-consumer kind of way, Nvidia is an excellent service. You could take games you already own that you had to pay your money for, whether it was 60 bucks a pop, you got them on a steam sale, whatever the case may be, they're games you own and you could just play them anywhere because they provide you better hardware than you have at your own house. You know, you can make your own home network if you want and stream from your house. But chances are Nvidia is going to have better network infrastructure and better hardware in general. And this is why people have an issue with it. This article is on The Verge by Nick Stapp, but he did some research into why developers are pulling. And it really started with this Raphael Van Lerup guy over on Twitter. He said, sorry to those who are disappointed, you can no longer play the Long Dark, which is an indie game on GeForce Now. Nvidia didn't ask our permission to put the game on the platform, so we asked them to remove it. Please take your complaints to them. Not us devs should control where their games exist. And you know, on the surface, this seems like a pretty selfish remark because they don't control where their games exist. If you bought it on Steam, you could play it on anything that runs Steam. That's always been the kind of agreement with Steam and the consumers. Steam is the platform under which you are selling your game. Once people buy it on Steam, they can play it on whatever the hell they feel like it if it runs Steam. So never been a problem. There's even phones that people can hack and get steamed around and run your Steam games on your phone. They don't seem to have a problem with that either. They have a problem with the game existing on GeForce Now servers and people accessing that game, a game they paid for by the way. So this just feels stupid. Why would Nvidia even need permission for consumers to play the games they bought? Well, because we don't actually own our games. And we're going to get into that in a bit. That's really a huge issue in the video game industry that most of us consumers don't realize until now when these streaming services are coming, we don't own the games we buy. That's pretty scary, isn't it? And it's better to issue a digital game for a while, but it's been mostly swept under the rug until now. So later on, he said today's world is getting complexer does with lots of platform changes and shifts to streaming. So does have to be able to plan a strategy for how their games will appear and where. Does it mean surrounding a business? All the platforms acknowledge this. The long dark in GeForce Now in the future, you know, he might put it on there right now. He doesn't like the current situation. I think he was offered a graphics card as an apology or something. That's what he claims anyways. I don't even think an apology needed to be made. But this does bring to forefront that technically what Nvidia is doing is wrong. Even though on the consumer level, it seems so right. Let's get into this. So there are two sides of the controversy. One in favor of the game maker and one in favor of the customer. And this is why as a customer, like what's Nvidia doing wrong? We're just playing against our own. For game developers and publishers, a digital game is not the same as a physical good. And you can do what you want with, including resell it. A digital game is a license to use a virtual good in a way stipulated by licensing agreements both from the maker of the game and from the marketplace that sells it, in this case, Steam. Technically this is actually true of physical copies. You know those EULAs and stuff that we never read? It's the same for digital as it is for physical. Technically when we buy a physical game on Switch, you know, any of these games or whatever in here, we don't actually own the game. Even though we have the right to resell the physical card, what we are purchasing is a license to play that game and they are just delivering the game to us on a physical medium instead of a digital one. But technically, we just bought a license that can be revoked. We do not own these games. It feels weird talking like that, but we don't. We just don't own the games. And this is very, very, even easier to track with digital versus obviously a physical copy that you can never connect to the internet and no one would be the wiser what you're doing with it. This is of course in order to have the physical games also have these license agreements. Yeah, so you can't burn one, the blue, red, resell, blah, blah, blah. A license to play a game does not mean another company can redistribute it. Even if you personally bought the license. That's what's happening with GeForce Now and it's important to understand that NVIDIA isn't just renting you a virtual machine. It's renting you a virtual machine and then redistributing a video game sold by Steam under agreements that do not include NVIDIA, at least not yet. And it is not a hardware rental service and pretending it is one is disingenuous. But it is a hardware rental service. I don't think it's disingenuous to call what GeForce Now is doing. It's a hardware rental service because it is. You are renting their servers to play their games anywhere you want. It just so happens that because you're playing on their servers, you can happen to stream it anywhere and play anything you want. But they are right from a legal standpoint in that the problem with GeForce Now is that they are redistributing the games to consumers that technically paid for it, but we didn't pay for that hardware. And we are not in control of that hardware, direct control of that NVIDIA is. There's basically licensing issues. And it has made this streaming platform, which, by the way, is the first one to come up publicly to kind of get things right. And it's not even like doing a Netflix of gaming kind of thing. It's just saying, hey, look, you already own games. Let's just make those games you own possible to play anywhere. Very brilliant strategy, very different than what XCloud is going to do. Very different than what Google Stadia has done. It's kind of its own unique service that makes sense in the marketplace. But it makes sense from the consumer side. The developers want to make money. It basically comes down to we don't have a way to monetize this, so we don't want you doing it. That's the long and the short of the whole argument. So NVIDIA is effectively injecting itself into the sale and distribution of a piece of software, which I disagree with because they're not injecting themselves into the sale of it, but they could affect sales, I guess, tangentially. Like if a developer brings a game to phone, you download on your phone or just use GeForce Now, I don't know. It's a weird thing. Anyways, we've seen this time and again with companies that I've hoped to similarly distribute from the failed over-the-air broadcast TV streamer, Aerio, to theater subscription plan, Movipass. It rarely works because the companies either face steep fees out of fear of getting sued. The business plan isn't sustainable, or because they go ahead without permission and get litigated to the ground. StrongArming, a new distribution model into reality is expensive and adversarial, and only a few companies like Apple with iTunes can successfully say they pulled it off. So even if it doesn't seem NVIDIA is doing something similar here, legally it is. That's the problem. It doesn't, they are the renting hardware for you to play your games, but legally that's not exactly what it is and what they're doing actually breaks all the end user license agreements and all this stuff. This is precisely why Steam runs its PC cafe program, a bulk licensee service so gaming cafes can acquire the rights to host software that its customers may have already paid for. This is also why many developers choose to use their own PC launchers, doing so affords them the freedom to control how the game is distributed even more tightly. That's important for things like piracy, copyright, infringement, and cheating. Again, this is things like Blizzard with the battle.net launcher, stuff like that, why they're getting kind of, you can maybe buy a game through Steam, but you got to use our launcher to play a kind of thing. One good example of the downside of GeForce Now is mobile ports. So a developer will put resources towards developing a competent mobile port of their game with hopes to resell it to a new audience to recoup investment on the port and make some profit. If GeForce Now is available on mobile, which it is on Android. My counter argument obviously to that is that streaming does not replace playing games locally. It'll always be better to play games locally on local hardware than it ever will be streaming. Streaming is just an alternative method to play for people who are budget oriented. I honestly don't think that anyone's going to replace playing a game locally on their phone with GeForce Now for games that are actually available on the phone. In fact, the most likely things to be played on the phone are gonna be games that you can't play on your phone. Like you want to get Doom Eternal, play it on your phone. You can't do that normally. But games that are built specifically for the phone are still gonna be used. It's still gonna be downloaded through the app stores and stuff. So I don't really think it's, I think it's more of a fear than a reality. Heatlunit says, I expect we'll see much more of this. Player Steam Library, Anywhere Services are amazing for the consumer, but they're potential potentially. And there's, it's potentially terrible for Desmond not necessarily, because you still have to buy the game. It kills the ability to commercialize ports for new platforms, mobile, et cetera. And negotiate exclusivity deals. So it's basically companies want more money and getting GeForce Now doesn't let them make more money on multiple platforms. You want to play on PlayStation and Xbox, you got to buy the PlayStation version and the Xbox version. Or get GeForce Now, which could be available on both of them. And then you buy it once on Steam and you play it on everything. It's just a big, it's a big kerfuffle. And it really raises a lot of red flags with game streaming. And unfortunately, the red flags from game streaming are coming from the very same people who make the games rather than the people that are trying to provide the services. What GeForce Now is trying to provide is an amazing consumer-friendly service for games we already own. What XCloud looks like it's trying to do is be a Netflix of gaming where you are subscribing to them and you get access to a whole bunch of games just like Game Pass works. And so that's like a different service. GeForce is about games you already own. You don't actually own the games on XCloud, but you can play them as long as you're subscribed. So one maintains ownership, one doesn't. So they're completely different services and they could easily coexist. And then obviously if Google Stadia out there being like, hey look, you just straight up buy $60 games from us and then use our services is the only way to play them. GeForce Now seems like a much better alternative to Google Stadia because you spend 60 bucks to buy a game, whatever the new Call of Duty or something on Steam, you own that game even if you're not using GeForce Now. So you could stop using GeForce Now and still download that game and play it. So it's a much more preferred service in my opinion than something like Google Stadia. But again, this is what's gonna happen. The same thing that happens with hardware is gonna happen with streaming services. So we're never gonna truly get an all-encompassing Netflix of gaming or even a few services that combine to be a Netflix of gaming. Like if you get Hulu for some of the TV shows plus Netflix plus say Disney Plus or whatever, you're pretty much covering most of your basis for content, whether it's TV content, movies and just entertainment in general, you kinda get most things covered. There's a few outliers. But those, okay cool, three services and done. Well there's gonna be an infinite amount of these streaming services because there's gonna be all these exclusivity deals being signed. So what'll happen is only Blizzard games can appear on XCloud, they can't appear on GeForce Now. But then like, or not Activision, that's the same company. Ubisoft games can only appear on GeForce Now but can't appear on XCloud. Like there's gonna be all of this stuff that's gonna be a fight over which company gets the most money from these streaming services to put their games on their platform and Indies are gonna be kind of left to fight for scraps because they're not gonna know how to approach this at all. I think something like GeForce Now is actually beneficial to Indies because you can buy an Indie game and then play it anywhere. I think that's a big benefit to Indie games because it's gonna open you up to more consumers in my opinion. But devs aren't looking at it like that. You know, like the dev for the long dark is looking at it as, hey look because this thing exists here, I can't release it on phones or this and that because we're not gonna make money there. Ignoring the fact that they're actually opening up to a larger audience in general of streamers. So this is the battle that's going to ruin game streaming. I still think there's gonna be a point to the services. I think if you own an Xbox, there's no reason not to use XCloud. I think if you own Nintendo and they open a streaming service, there's no reason to not use that. If you have a PC and you'd like to take some of your PC games on the go, there's no reason to not dabble in GeForce Now but at the same point, I don't think there's ever gonna be one platform that really blows up because unfortunately these licensing arguments are gonna continue to exist. And as long as they continue to exist, it's really gonna start being off-putting to consumers as we slowly begin to realize that we don't own what we think we own. When we buy those games on Steam, we don't own them. When we buy games physically for our systems, we don't own them. There is no ownership. We are renting a license that can be revoked at any point. And unfortunately, that's ruining its head now with GeForce Now. And it's a harsh reminder that physical games are probably still gonna be important, very important for a very long time, which is good news for those of us that like physical games because we don't wanna deal with this crap. And unfortunately for streaming services that are pretty pro-consumer right now, GeForce Now is a very pro-consumer service. XCloud's looking like it's gonna be a very pro-consumer service. They're gonna be kind of in a tough spot because these companies, they want more money. They want people to buy the game twice. They want you to pay for the game and then they also wanna get money from the place that's letting you play the game. It's kind of a sticky slippery road, slippery slope to be honest. So you guys let me know what you think about this on the comments below. I obviously applaud NVIDIA and hope that GeForce Now can turn around and get these companies back and work something out because to be honest, I think GeForce Now is a fantastic service having tested it out, the free version anyways. And I don't wanna see it go away. I don't wanna see game streaming just instantly killed here. And there's a lot of you out there that don't like game streaming or like the idea of it. So you're kind of glad these issues exist. But just remember that it's also ruined to have issues with even digital purchases in general or even physical copies in our ownership of them. It's calling into question all of that stuff because legally, we don't have rights to crap as gamers. As consumers, we don't own the things that we buy in the video game industry. We physically own the hardware, like we own this switch and even though there's licensing agreements, we can legally do whatever we want with this platform. But the games, we can't. We don't actually own them. And that's a scary thought. So let me know what you think about this all down in the comments below. A very different kind of video, but a very, very important discussion because this is the future of this very same video game industry that we all partake in every single day on this channel. So you know what you think? I end with an over chance from Nintendo Prime. Be sure to enter our Animal Crossing New Horizons giveaway by commenting, liking, subscribing and dropping a click on that bell icon. It really helps out the channel and obviously enters you into that giveaway. Winner will be announced March 18th. Otherwise, I'll catch you guys all in the next video.