MARCH 2020 PCWorld 41raid boss in way better fidelity than your potato
PC can normally handle. No more real-time ray
tracing from the cloud in Modern Warfare.
Nvidia announced its removal with the
following statement (go.pcworld.com/nvst):
“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.
This means continually adding new games, and
on occasion, having to remove games—similar
to other digital service providers.
“Per their request, please be advised
Activision Blizzard games will be removed
from the service. While unfortunate, we hope
to work together with Activision Blizzard to
reenable these games and more in the future.
“In addition to the hundreds of games
currently supported, we have over 1,500
games that developers have asked to be
on-boarded to the service. Look for weekly
updates as to new games we are adding.”
On the plus side, since Bungie recently
broke away from Activision Blizzard, you’ll still be
able to play Destiny 2 on GeForce Now. The
game is central to Google Stadia’s $10 per
month Pro subscription, but you can play it for no
cost whatsoever on GeForce Now, as the base
game’s free-to-play and Nvidia offers a totally
free-as-in-beer-free tier (go.pcworld.com/frbr).
Still, Activision Blizzard’s withdrawal is a
major, major bummer. Sure, GeForce Now
still offers vastly more games than Stadia and
other cloud-based challengers, but Blizzard’s
Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, and Hearthstone
are some of the most-played and most-loved
franchises in PC history. Call of Duty,
meanwhile, tops sales charts year-in and
year-out, and Modern Warfare’s removal
means you won’t be able to try out its ray
tracing with your fancy GeForce Now
Founders subscription. This hurts.
We spoke at length about GeForce Now
and why it rocks on a recent episode of our Full
Nerd podcast (go.pcworld.com/p124), and its
value proposition isn’t limited to gamers alone.
Nvidia’s service doesn’t sell you games
directly. Instead, it basically rents you a gaming
PC in the cloud, and you sign into gaming
platforms like Steam, the Epic Game Store, and
(formerly) Battle.net to play games you already
own. Nvidia doesn’t take an extra cut. By
giving you access to more powerful hardware
than you might already own, GeForce Now
effectively encourages you to buy more games
through existing storefronts. It feels like a
win-win for everybody involved.
In his hands-on with the service, my
Macworld colleague Leif Johnson (go.
pcworld.com/gnrv) stated that GeForce Now
is probably as good as Mac gaming is ever
going to get.
“Blizzard, which famously used to
simultaneously release PC and Mac games at
once, has yet to release a Mac port of
Overwatch five years after its release,” he
wrote. “...Nor is there any reason to pour
around $1,000 into an external GPU and
graphics card (go.pcworld.com/gpue) just so