Not so long ago, at the beginning of this month, Activision pulled its games from Nvidia’s GeForce Now game streaming service. Activisions decision to do this has, reportedly, come down to a misunderstanding on Nvidia’s part. Now, it looks like the same story might be repeating itself once again as Bethesda has decided to pull all of its games, aside from Wolfenstein: Youngblood, for unknown reasons. Is this yet another misunderstanding, this time between Nvidia and Bethesda or something more?
Nvidia made the following announcement in a blog post:
“Please be advised most Bethesda Softworks titles will be removed from the GeForce Now service today. Wolfenstein Youngblood will remain for all members.”
Nvidia has yet to comment on why Bethesda games have been removed or prodide any informaiton on whether or not they will be returning, but second post has confirmed that there could be more withdraws in the future:
“Earlier this month, we passed a milestone on our cloud gaming journey by removing the waitlist and opening our doors to more gamers, Over 1 million new gamers have taken to the cloud by signing up for a free a plan or upgrading to the founder’s membership, which includes a 90-day free trial.”
They also described the trial:
This trial is an important transitional period where gamers, developers, and publishers can try the premium experience with minimal commitment while we continue to refine our offering. As we approach a paid service, some publishers may choose to remove games before the trial period ends. Ultimately, they maintain control over their content and decide whether the game you purchase includes streaming on GeForce Now. Meanwhile, others will bring games back as they continue to realize GeForce Now’s value.
So we don’t know for sure if that’s the only reason for the withdraws, but as mentioned, we could expect more games to leave GeForce Now. The good news is that there is a massive queue of games waiting to be added to the service. Be that as it may, this still leads to a rocky start for a service that holds so much promise. Will Activision and Bethesda be the only two major publishers to withdraw or will there be more in the future? And, what does this mean for subscribers? It doesn’t sound to promising to know that you can lose the ability to stream entire libraries of games over a simple misunderstanding between two companies.
