The GeForce Now streaming service has not received a great deal of media attention.\u00a0 This is surprising as it is arguably the most advanced service on the market.\u00a0 It was timely that as students are heading back to school, Nvidia announced GeForce Now would be available on Chromebooks.<\/p>\n
Nvidia is known for its PC graphics cards that can cost over $1,000.\u00a0 \u00a0Of course, many consumers can not afford to spend big money on a high-end PC rig. \u00a0This is where GeForce Now can bridge the gap and let consumers experience what an expensive system can provide.<\/p>\n
We have described GeForce Now as a major competitor to services like Google Stadia<\/a>.\u00a0 The reality is that GeForce blows Stadia out of the water in most metrics.\u00a0 Nvidia claims GeForce has 4 million registered users that stream 15 million hours of games per month.<\/p>\n In the scheme of things this is not much considering the service offers a free option.\u00a0 However, it is likely the tip of the iceberg.\u00a0 The ability to play on Chromebook opens a whole new audience for GeForce.<\/p>\n Nvidia says 80% of its GeForce users do not have the hardware specs to play the games they use on the service.\u00a0 In other words, they are using the streaming service because they have no other option.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Chromebook usage is exploding as kids are faced with the challenge of distance learning.\u00a0 As one San Diego school explained this week:<\/p>\n Unfortunately the new Chromebooks that we ordered back in May still have not arrived (they have all been backordered as just about every school in the world is trying to move to one-to-one laptops).<\/p>\n Chromebooks have limited storage, memory and they can\u2019t even run many traditional software products, not to mention games.\u00a0 However, students are getting them in mass.\u00a0 The beauty of GeForce Now is it can get around those issues.<\/p>\n For Nvidia, GeForce is a great branding opportunity for an entire generation.\u00a0 The 15-year old kid today can grow up to be an Nvidia loyalist through the experience of GeForce on Chromebook.<\/p>\n Of course, the competition in this space will be pretty intense.\u00a0 Our testers wanted to try out the newly released Microsoft Flight Simulator.\u00a0 Microsoft Flight Simulator will tax the resources of a high-end Pc and seems a perfect candidate for streaming.<\/p>\n But Microsoft has its own subscriptions services which include Game Pass and the competing xCloud streaming service. \u00a0This makes it unlikely Microsoft Flight Simulator will appear on Nvidia\u2019s service.<\/p>\n The battle over streaming services is part of a larger battle over game distribution.\u00a0 Epic is fighting with Apple and Google over its royalty fees at the same time that Apple announces streaming services like Stadia and xCloud violate the App Store guidelines.<\/p>\n Really this is a battle of the rich and powerful versus the richer and more powerful.\u00a0 With a $17 billion valuation, Epic ironically is able to cast itself as the underdog.<\/p>\n For its part Nvidia has a valuation in the $300 billion range.\u00a0 For perspective that is almost twice the market cap for Sony and Nintendo combined.<\/p>\n DFC recently released a report on video game consumer segmentation<\/a>.\u00a0 Overall, there are over 3 billion consumers worldwide.\u00a0 Console game systems from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo reach less than 10% of those consumers.\u00a0 Meanwhile with the growth of platforms like Chromebook, PC game users have soared to 1.5 billion, most of them on low-end systems<\/a>.<\/p>\n It is these massive numbers that have so many well-capitalized companies fighting for future ownership of game consumers.\u00a0 Right now, the first battles are just getting started.\u00a0 It will be a long war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The GeForce Now streaming service has not received a great deal of media attention.\u00a0 This is surprising as it is arguably the most advanced service on the market.\u00a0 It was timely that as students are heading back to school, Nvidia announced GeForce Now would be available on Chromebooks. Nvidia is known for its PC graphics […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":17313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[49,110],"tags":[83],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17312"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17314,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17312\/revisions\/17314"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dfcint.com\/dossier\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}