Nvidia GeForce Now is a huge success – despite losing big games

GeForce Now
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia’s GeForce Now has sold out of Founders memberships – in other words, slots for paying subscribers – in Europe, with the situation in the US apparently being the same.

In a forum post, Nvidia announced: “As you can imagine, we’re experiencing a substantial increase in the number of GeForce Now players and their amount of playtime.

“As a result, our Founders memberships are currently sold out in Europe and we anticipate North America won’t be far behind.”

However, looking at Nvidia’s US site, it appears that memberships have also now run out in that region.

So the exit of a number of major game publishers from Nvidia’s streaming service doesn’t appear to have put off folks wishing to subscribe – although as the above post hints, we could also be seeing another ramification of coronavirus here (with people staying at home, and looking to entertain themselves on their PC or other devices).

Nvidia says it’s working to open up additional subscription slots by adding more servers to the GeForce Now data centers, and you can sign up to be notified of when further capacity is available.

Freebie only

You can, of course, still sign up for the free GeForce Now tier, although you don’t get priority access (meaning you’ll be queuing a while) and play-time is limited to one hour (you can’t benefit from RTX graphics either).

One point to remember is that Nvidia’s initial offer for those signing up (with their payment details) for a Founders membership is the ability to cancel in the first three months, without penalty.

So one theory is there may be quite a few people who treated this as a better way to get a free trial, as it were, than the actual free tier – and thus when the initial three months is up, a fair bit of capacity might possibly be freed as those gamers leave (if they aren’t happy with the aforementioned high-profile publisher departures).

We shall see, of course, but whatever the outside influencing factors might be – if any – the popularity of GeForce Now’s subscription service can’t be denied, at least not going by the situation right now.

TOPICS

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

Latest in GPU
An Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070
Nvidia RTX 5080 stock is so barren that retailers are holding competitions where you can "win" the right to buy one for MSRP
An Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti
Nvidia could unleash RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti GPUs on PC gamers tomorrow, but there’s no sign of rumored RTX 5050 yet
An Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 on a table with its retail packaging
Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU spotted in Acer gaming PC, suggesting rumors of imminent launch are correct – and that it’ll run with only 8GB of video RAM
An AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT made by Sapphire on a table with its retail packaging
Want to buy an RX 9070 or 9070 XT but fed up of the GPUs being out of stock? AMD promises that “more supply is coming ASAP”
AMD RX 9070 GPU models
Modders do what AMD can't (or won't) by adding FSR 4 support to more games
Nvidia geforce rtx 3050
RTX 5050 rumors detail full spec of desktop graphics card, suggesting Nvidia may use slower video RAM – but I wouldn’t panic yet
Latest in News
A graphic of the PC Gaming Show
Get ready for a bounty of PC games on June 8, as the PC Gaming show is back
NordicTrack Ultra 1
The new NordicTrack Ultra 1 treadmill looks like it was designed by an architect and costs $15,000
An Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070
Nvidia RTX 5080 stock is so barren that retailers are holding competitions where you can "win" the right to buy one for MSRP
Assassin's Creed Shadows
Ubisoft shareholder accuses publisher of 'misleading investors', plans protest outside Paris HQ
Google Gemini AI logo on a smartphone with Google background
I made an AI version of Bilbo Baggins using Goggle Gemini for free, and shared a pipe with him outside Bag End – here’s what you can now do with Gems
Nicole Kidman wears a blue blouse with her arms crossed.
Netflix might be renewing The Perfect Couple and Beauty in Black for season 2, but I don’t get why when it’s canceled shows with poorer ratings