Nvidia’s GeForce Now game streaming service only came out of beta last week, and it’s already lost some major games. This week, Activision Blizzard pulled its entire catalog, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Overwatch, from the monthly subscription service.
“Per their request, please be advised Activision Blizzard games will be removed from the service,” wrote a representative of Nvidia on the company’s forums on Tuesday. “While unfortunate, we hope to work together with Activision Blizzard to reenable these games and more in the future.”
GeForce Now’s beta began way back in 2013 as a way for people to stream PC games to the Nvidia Shield TV set-top box. In 2017, Nvidia announced it would be broadening the service to allow people to stream games to their PCs, similar to Google Stadia and Microsoft’s Project xCloud. While the service was pricey when it first began, it’s only $5 a month now. Unlike Stadia, it allows players to stream games they already own instead of needing to buy them all over again. Of course, that feature is only as good as the publishers who support it.
“As we take GeForce NOW to the next step in its evolution, we’ve worked with publishers to onboard a robust catalog of your PC games,” the Nvidia representative wrote in the post. “This means continually adding new games, and on occasion, having to remove games–similar to other digital service providers.” It sounds like a comparison to PlayStation Now, whose library of games also changes every so often. It’s still an odd one, though, since GeForce Now doesn’t actually let you stream any games you don’t already own.
Stadia has similarly struggled to gain buy-in from some of the biggest game companies. Its meager catalog is not growing as fast as some users had hoped. Activision Blizzard’s games aren’t available to buy through Google’s service, either. Activision Blizzard said during its recent earnings call with investors that it would “continue to watch [Stadia] with interest,” but had nothing new to announce about bringing its games to the platform.
Nvidia and Activision Blizzard did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Source: gizmodo.com
