Man, I'm so salty about GFN - they have a great product and an economic model that makes sense but, for whatever reason, they gave in to publishers' pressure to remove some games from their service. This is doubly upsetting, as publishers should have no say on where I play the games I've already purchased - whether it's on a computer I physically own or on a computer I rent in the cloud.
Sadly, you generally don't purchase a game, but a license to play one in some form. I think the exact limits of their control have not yet been tested in court, but I don't think NVIDIA wants to be the one testing it.
And any way, NVIDIA is in no position to challenge the games industry on such things - they are very much in bed with them and would lose enormously if games suddenly all went for a big 'best on AMD' logo.
Geforce Now library kinda sucks to me, not all that much better than Stadia but that's my opinion. Stadia has a few names (e.g. Red Dead Redemption) that GFN doesn't and vice versa.
It used to be much better, but publishers cracked down on it when it started gaining traction.
I think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license on what is essentially rented cloud hardware. IP laws have come to stifle the very innovation they were supposed to protect.
Legally it's far from clear they can, but Nvidia entered a market where they can't afford to piss off game makers from their legacy business and folded on it.
This is probably what prevented the Stadia team from doing the same thing. Lot‘s of people saying: „why not partner with valve/steam for their library“. Because it‘s not Valves library to begin with. This was inevitable. No publisher cared about GFN playing their games in the cloud in the beginning. Just like studios sold off their content to Netflix for pennies in the beginning. It was free money and they didn‘t have a use for them anyways.
Now they smell money and opportunity to fleece a bigger company for higher fees. It happens all the time, unfortunately.
That‘s why it‘s pretty disappointing that stadia killed their first party studios. You have to produce your own content (like netflix) or at least partner with publishers to be exclusive or simple. This seems to be happening with Ubisoft.
But MS just has such a massive advantage with Gamepass.
So, I'm wondering, why doesn't google supply us with a desktop in the cloud, you can do whatever you want with it, but it has a nice graphics card so you can install steam on it if you want or origin or whatever. You download the game there and play that way. Publishers can't stop that can they?
Well, it would still be linux presumably. MS would likely not allow them to use Windows that way. Or they‘d make it prohibitively expensive. In any case there‘d be even less differentiation from xcloud.
Shadow does offer Windows VM‘s. It works pretty well, but it‘s also quite expensive and not really generally available.
GFN offers something unique: you can connect to existing stores like steam and play many of the games you already own there over GFN. This is a big deal.
They'll both let you play games you already paid for but Stadia makes you buy them again, unless that changed?
To me, that put Stadia in an odd place where only the more casual players without a gaming device would sign up, or those with enough money to pay twice because they spend a lot of time away (but with good internet).
Both have their own quirks, but they don't suffer from lack of games.