Activision forces NVIDIA to remove all game from GeForce NOW

[Edge-]

If I recall correctly Nvidia didn't ask for permission until a few months ago as they were preparing to leave beta. Which is why they lost a number of titles at the end of beta.

I mean, those games were pulled during the beta. It doesn't look like nvidia, who should know they'd need that approval before even testing, bothered to try.

They found out not every company was cool with what they were doing and are now scrambling to put business deals in place that would allow them to leverage their service.

There should have never been a, "We found out that we can't use our paid service to provide cloud gaming for third party software with their own, separate TOS/EULA" moment. This should have never made it past their first legal review, and should have been flagged with a plan to address before any serious work began.

Hell, when people asked GMs about it during beta they were told it wasn't an authorized service and that using it to log in was against the ToS.

Which still speaks to, "Nvidia either didn't know about this, which is monumentally stupid on their part, or were hoping to slide by unnoticed, which is also monumentally stupid on their part."

Absent more details from nvidia, or a clear statement from actiblizz, I just don't see any other read on the situation.

I think their legal department looked at actual laws and saw nothing forbidding their type of service. What they didn't anticipate was the ToS for some of these games prohibiting the stuff. Then they went in and started asking if it was cool for them to do what they were doing and a number of companies laughed in their faces.

That's literally part of the point of legal teams, who are heavily involved in writing TOS/EULA agreements. If they're not combing over those for potential publishers titles on their list, then they shouldn't be employed as a lawyer, and especially not for a major company like nvidia.

And they didn't "ask", they straight up did it. And only stopped when companies started asking them what the fuck are they doing and probably threatening to take their asses to court if they didn't knock it off ASAP. Nvidia isn't a company they necessarily want to piss off, there are extensive hardware partnerships with publishers, but it's also not a company that they're going to let push them around.

[Vorkreist]

Eh, why do you think these services will never take off?
Because they don't offer free games.
It's like Netflix bringing you movies at a flat monthly rate, but you have to pay for each movie.
Those with dirty cheap laptops will probably pirate a game instead of paying a monthly fee and on top of that spending 10-20% of their laptops worth on a single game.
Use your brain bit.

Lets use our brain a bit.
400 dollar shit laptop + 5 dollars sub + 60 $ top AAA game with requirements that barely get cover on a 3k pc setup = 1080p 60 fps AAA gaming.
400 dollar shit laptop + piratebay = oh my 400 laptop and my dumb brain got fried when I tried to run latest Red Dead Redemption which filled my entire HDD.

Cloud gaming is not targeted at someone who is so broke he can't afford a cheap sub + buy a game to play on his cheap laptop.
Cloud gaming is targeted in the long run on everyone who can't afford to throw 10k for the latest top end RTX and i999 cpu. Its a cheaper alternative in any way you can think of. People can't see the larger picture and understand that the future is all cloud gaming. You will eventually play high requirement games on a any device with just a crap cheap netflix like subscription. Microsoft is just now pushing a bundle of games under a single sub. Most of the top companies have their own cloud gaming projects. Everything is moving that way. Piracy has been dying slowly for quite a while. If you can afford a pc that can run AAA games of today you can afford buying the fucking games.

[D3athsting]

This makes geforce now much more appealing for me! Thanks activi$ion

P.s. In case of any doubts about actiblizzard becoming worse than ea, here's the answer

[Kallisto]

I don't want an Fing new computer for the 20th time.

Then that's a you problem. You bought an inferior product for gaming and refuse to adjust, you want to world to cater to you. This crying is basically the same as buying and XBOX one, using a service deamed by Sony as not allowed to run their games on the XBOX one and then crying about how Sony has clamped down on the not allowed system.

[Onikaroshi]

Lets use our brain a bit.
400 dollar shit laptop + 5 dollars sub + 60 $ top AAA game with requirements that barely get cover on a 3k pc setup = 1080p 60 fps AAA gaming.
400 dollar shit laptop + piratebay = oh my 400 laptop and my dumb brain got fried when I tried to run latest Red Dead Redemption which filled my entire HDD.

Cloud gaming is not targeted at someone who is so broke he can't afford a cheap sub + buy a game to play on his cheap laptop.
Cloud gaming is targeted in the long run on everyone who can't afford to throw 10k for the latest top end RTX and i999 cpu. Its a cheaper alternative in any way you can think of. People can't see the larger picture and understand that the future is all cloud gaming. You will eventually play high requirement games on a any device with just a crap cheap netflix like subscription. Microsoft is just now pushing a bundle of games under a single sub. Most of the top companies have their own cloud gaming projects. Everything is moving that way. Piracy has been dying slowly for quite a while. If you can afford a pc that can run AAA games of today you can afford buying the fucking games.

You can build a pc for ~400 that will run even the newest games, let's not pretend that you have to drop 10k to get a pc that can play things.

[Onikaroshi]

No, what I'm saying is back in Nov or December is when they started asking for permission because they were going to start charging money. At that point they had a number of games get pulled. Blizz, as usual, took longer to reply and so they were one of the last shoes to drop. As for the lawyers being shit bit... yeah, most lawyers are terrible. And lawyers for a company like Nvidia mostly worry about things like patents and copyrights, not EULA's for video games.

I mean, I don't even work in Corporate Law and even I was sitting there like... is this legal? Specially since blizz is obviously (currently) against cloud gaming.

[Edge-]

No, what I'm saying is back in Nov or December is when they started asking for permission because they were going to start charging money. At that point they had a number of games get pulled. Blizz, as usual, took longer to reply and so they were one of the last shoes to drop. As for the lawyers being shit bit... yeah, most lawyers are terrible. And lawyers for a company like Nvidia mostly worry about things like patents and copyrights, not EULA's for video games.

But like...they shouldn't have been up there to begin with without approval. Like, holy shit. I work with licensors frequently, and if we pulled something like this without their knowledge they'd go fucking ballistic. And then fire us. And then sue my company to dust. And if we didn't have an agreement with them, like in this instance, they'd have some angry phone calls followed by a parade of lawyers to end our company forever.

This is standard partnership 101 stuff. Which is why I find this so mystifying, nvidia isn't a small or inexperienced company. This shit shouldn't be happening.

And if nvidia only has patent lawyers, which I'd bet a lot they don't, then they're similarly stupid. They have their own TOS/EULA for their various software, so it's not something that should be foreign to their legal team.

[Kallisto]

Oh the EULA that says "unauthorized" cloud gaming isn't allowed? I know I need to spell things out for you, so did you notice the "unauthorized" word? Good.

And you actually think Nvidia is going to spend a fat chunk of money developing and testing a service and not have lawyers vet the legality of it and ensure the stuff they are using is "authorized"? Notice how that "authorized" does NOT have a "un" in front of it like the one in the first sentence? Good.

Now stop bothering me.

If it were authorized they'd be a legal agreement between 2 PLCs (Activision-Blizzard and Nvidia corporation). Such agreements since there is at least one PLC involved HAS to be opened to public scrutiny due to the nature of public share holders. If such an agreement exist we'd know about it, it would be easy to find. The fact it isn't easy to find means it is 99% likely never existed.

[Strawberry]

Lets use our brain a bit.
400 dollar shit laptop + 5 dollars sub + 60 $ top AAA game with requirements that barely get cover on a 3k pc setup = 1080p 60 fps AAA gaming.
400 dollar shit laptop + piratebay = oh my 400 laptop and my dumb brain got fried when I tried to run latest Red Dead Redemption which filled my entire HDD.

Cloud gaming is not targeted at someone who is so broke he can't afford a cheap sub + buy a game to play on his cheap laptop.
Cloud gaming is targeted in the long run on everyone who can't afford to throw 10k for the latest top end RTX and i999 cpu. Its a cheaper alternative in any way you can think of. People can't see the larger picture and understand that the future is all cloud gaming. You will eventually play high requirement games on a any device with just a crap cheap netflix like subscription. Microsoft is just now pushing a bundle of games under a single sub. Most of the top companies have their own cloud gaming projects. Everything is moving that way. Piracy has been dying slowly for quite a while. If you can afford a pc that can run AAA games of today you can afford buying the fucking games.

Lol, did you really use a $5 + $60 game as an example?
Who would buy one game and keep it forever?
I'm not saying that cloud gaming is not the future. I'm not saying the opposite either. I'm saying is that they are approaching it wrong.
There's Netflix streaming movies. Spotify streaming music. And tons of alternatives- You pay a monthly fee and have access to tons of shit. Not everything, but tons of shit.
Once gaming industry gets that through their thick, money grabbing heads, that's when cloud gaming will take off. Until then, not going to happen.

Also, piracy is not dying and it's not going away.
Here's one of the reasons why:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019...y-is-back.html

[Linkedblade]

Most likely botting.

I would think this is the case. You could possibly run a bunch of instances of wow on the same PC using a streaming service. And it wouldn't be any where near as taxing as running those instances locally.

[Onikaroshi]

Fair enough, but this area is a weird murky new area. They aren’t selling the software, just the ability to run it. I agree they should have read the eula for everything they listed as “officially supported”, but at this point is looks like they didn’t.

It's definitely murky because it's new, but that should have meant they were extra careful. Nothing would kill it faster than being sued for all this.

[Mojo03]

If it were authorized they'd be a legal agreement between 2 PLCs (Activision-Blizzard and Nvidia corporation). Such agreements since there is at least one PLC involved HAS to be opened to public scrutiny due to the nature of public share holders. If such an agreement exist we'd know about it, it would be easy to find. The fact it isn't easy to find means it is 99% likely never existed.

Oh ya? Prove that, that kind of authorization needs to be made public armchair expert.

As for your other dumb, toxic comment. I don’t want a new computer and to get one that runs at the level the games on GeForce run at is way beyond anything I’m going to buy just to play a handful of games I need a computer to play.

[Aurabolt]

I took the time to go through this whole thread and I have just ONE question for Mods who've commented so far: Why have you allowed this thread to continue to exist, let alone let the OP argue his opinion and bash everyone who tried to give him facts and truth against his worldview?

The initial post was answered logically, calmly and reasonably at least a two dozen times--including both of you--at this point. I wasted 15 minutes of my life reading every single post in this thread and want to spare someone else the same anguish.

[Sinyc]

https://www.pcgamer.com/activision-b...m-geforce-now/

Seriously F&^% this company.

Some of us bought games and used this service to play those games that got removed out of nowhere with literally no explanation. Not to mention the F-ing beta went on for over 2 years and they never had an issue with it then.

I literally can't play any games now as I only have a Mac pro.

Why would they do this to hurt their name even more after the Warcraft 3 debacle barely a week ago? I'm genuinely pissed.

What games did you buy and/or are subscribed to that you can't even play since you just have a "Mac Pro"? Why did you buy/subscribe to these games in the first place? Genuinely curious, not shaming.

[Edge-]

Oh ya? Prove that, that kind of authorization needs to be made public armchair expert.

For a publicly traded company engaging in a financial agreement with another publicly traded company? Uh...yeah...that's the kind of shit that generally needs to be announced per FTC guidelines.

[Beefhammer]

https://www.pcgamer.com/activision-b...m-geforce-now/

Seriously F&^% this company.

Some of us bought games and used this service to play those games that got removed out of nowhere with literally no explanation. Not to mention the F-ing beta went on for over 2 years and they never had an issue with it then.

I literally can't play any games now as I only have a Mac pro.

Why would they do this to hurt their name even more after the Warcraft 3 debacle barely a week ago? I'm genuinely pissed.

Maybe, just maybe Nvidia did something wrong? Ever think of that? We don't know the full story but many other publishers have pulled their games too, but yet you only cry foul at Blizzard.

- - - Updated - - -

Oh ya? Prove that, that kind of authorization needs to be made public armchair expert.

As for your other dumb, toxic comment. I don’t want a new computer and to get one that runs at the level the games on GeForce run at is way beyond anything I’m going to buy just to play a handful of games I need a computer to play.

Maybe you should listen to those explaining how you are wrong or at the very least, google these basic fucking things you seem to know nothing about but go on like you what the fuck you are talking about.

[Mojo03]

Maybe, just maybe Nvidia did something wrong? Ever think of that? We don't know the full story but many other publishers have pulled their games too, but yet you only cry foul at Blizzard.

- - - Updated - - -



Maybe you should listen to those explaining how you are wrong or at the very least, google these basic fucking things you seem to know nothing about but go on like you what the fuck you are talking about.

Nvidia released a statement about it, Activision didn’t and has a history of not being pro consumer, but you’re right we don’t know details, like I’ve said 90 Fing times.

Maybe I should listen to who explaining how I’m wrong? No one has proved me wrong on a Fing thing and in fact the opposite has happened throughout this entire Fing thread. Not to mention I get zero recognition when I flat out prove them wrong. Generally a bunch of armchair experts falling flat.

If it’s a basic thing it should be easy to prove that every single authorization and agreement is public knowledge.

[Beefhammer]

Nvidia released a statement about it, Activision didn’t and has a history of not being pro consumer, but you’re right we don’t know details, like I’ve said 90 Fing times.

Maybe I should listen to who explaining how I’m wrong? No one has proved me wrong on a Fing thing and in fact the opposite has happened throughout this entire Fing thread. Not to mention I get zero recognition when I flat out prove them wrong. Generally a bunch of armchair experts falling flat.

If it’s a basic thing it should be easy to prove that every single authorization and agreement is public knowledge.

Then you should know that financial agreement between 2 publicly traded companies have to be made public. And multiple other publishers have pulled thier games too. Yet you just want to pile shining Blizzard and you attitude in this thread make you seem like a troll or someone who doesn't know what he's talking about.

[Mojo03]

Then you should know that financial agreement between 2 publicly traded companies have to be made public. And multiple other publishers have pulled thier games too. Yet you just want to pile shining Blizzard and you attitude in this thread make you seem like a troll or someone who doesn't know what he's talking about.

Then it should be really easy for you to find agreements from Bungie, Epic games, and Steam.

[Stickiler]

Then it should be really easy for you to find agreements from Bungie, Epic games, and Steam.

Ummm. Steam is software, not a company.

And even taking the companies behind those, Bungie, Epic and Valve are all private companies, completely different to Blizzard-Activision, which is publicly traded.