Nvidia GeForce Now Free Users Will Soon Get Ads

Free users of Nvidia’s GeForce Now will begin seeing ads on February 28. Nvidia’s subscription cloud gaming service launched in 2020 and is a good substitute or supplement for people who may not have the most powerful gaming rigs at home but still want to enjoy playing games with ultra settings. The GeForce Now catalog of games currently features nearly 2,000 titles ranging from indie to AAA and from a wide selection of genres.

The service offers three subscription tiers, the lowest one being free. While the two other tiers of GeForce Now got a price hike in Canada and the EU in October 2023, users in the United States will probably still find the service to be a good value. The Ultimate tier, which costs $19.99/month, gives subscribers access to RTX 4080 graphical performance with ray tracing, 4K resolution, up to 120 FPS, and a session length of eight hours. Free users, however, are limited to one-hour sessions, are given the equivalent of a basic gaming rig, and sometimes have to wait in a line hundreds of players long before they can play.

As reported by The Verge, beginning on February 28, free users of GeForce Now will also begin seeing up to two minutes of ads while they wait in the queue to get into a game. The purpose is to offset the costs of providing the free service and, eventually, according to Nvidia spokesperson Stephanie Ngo, the ads should actually reduce the wait time for free users overall. These ads, it’s worth noting, will not interrupt actual gameplay and therefore shouldn’t be too much of a bother. Subscribers to the two paid tiers of GeForce Now will be exempt from the ads.

Since its launch four years ago, Nvidia’s GeForce Now has been steadily improving what it offers to subscribers both in terms of stream quality and the games that it supports. Unlike Stadia, Google’s now defunct cloud gaming service, GeForce Now does not require people to buy games specifically for the platform. Instead, they can access games they already own on Steam, Epic