News Nvidia Kills Off GameStream Feature On Shield Devices

[Admin]

Nvidia has emailed Shield device owners that the GameStream feature will no longer be available starting in mid-February.

Nvidia Kills Off GameStream Feature On Shield Devices : Read more

 

[atomicWAR]

Part of me wants to call out Nvidia hard as streaming was a strong selling point for shield devices but there are other options in the Play store these days for streaming. Still it is in bad form and streaming was one of the reasons I bought into a shield handheld/tablet back in the day...never got onboard with the set-a-top box version for TVs and thus no longer run shield devices due to their age as batteries have died, been replaced and died again for good. Those running the set-a-top box must be irked. Its OLD hardware though to be fair. Nvidia needs a proper refresh at this point.

 

[3tank]

Wow- i dodged a bullet there. I was so tempted before and was ready to get one this week but now will certainly not.
Thanks fpr the report

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Now I am -very- glad I didn't buy one, which I had in my Amazon cart...

 

[JTWrenn]

Recurring revenue is almost all these companies care about now, because all they care about is money...not making good products to get the money. So many things don't require a damn recurring subscription because they don't need cloud to do these things and gamestream was one of them. Glad Steam...so far...has been less insane about this stuff.

 

[Unolocogringo]

I smell a major lawsuit. Removing functionality after the fact ?
💩

 

[-Fran-]

"Nvidia didn't share the reason why it's pulling the plug on GameStream. However, the chipmaker invited Shield users to give GeForce Now a try."

I mean... The writing on the wall could not be clearer: why give that for free to people when you can just force them to pay you for the service?

Regards.

 

[kyzarvs]

I smell a major lawsuit. Removing functionality after the fact ?
💩

I very much doubt it. There's countless instances of functionality changing over time from every sector of the industry - the newest Shields are a 3 year old design.

 

[kal326]

This is seems like a shameless push to convert users already using streaming to GeForce Now and keep subscriptions up. As the GPU supply issues have mostly resolved.

They just announced a huge two year pandemic subscriber gain back in August. However no mentions of what number were paid and of what tier though. Well of course gamers probably flocked to services like that when they couldn’t get or didn’t want to pay stupid high mark ups. Now I wonder how many of those subscribers are sticking around. Selling a GPU is great, but perpetually renting one out in a time shared service is what really gets the investors salivating. Now they need to keep those numbers up at the very least and growing if possible.

Other than the PR hit, it’s a win win win for Nvidia. They get rid of the technical debt of having to maintain the local streaming tech, sounds like they cleared out a lot of old stock just before this announcement, and anybody that isn’t absolutely pissed about it they may convert to a investor pleasing sub.

Remains to be seen how bad the PR backlash is, but Nvidia seems to be convinced they are the goose that lays the golden GPUs and sure people will be mad. However even if they are mad, they are still buying for now.

 

[Giroro]

I very much doubt it. There's countless instances of functionality changing over time from every sector of the industry - the newest Shields are a 3 year old design.

Hey, Sony had to pay their out a lot of money when they retroactively removed Linux functionality in the PS3. And by "a lot of money" I mean like $6 each to a tiny subset of uses, iirc paid via a valueless game download .... which might not even be downloadable anymore as Sony shuts down old servers.

But I think the more concerning part of the "right to own" fight, is that it looks like Nvidia is canceling all of GameStream. That's a feature/Selling point for all their expensive GPUs, not just their niche streaming box.

 

[Giroro]

"Nvidia didn't share the reason why it's pulling the plug on GameStream. However, the chipmaker invited Shield users to give GeForce Now a try."

I mean... The writing on the wall could not be clearer: why give that for free to people when you can just force them to pay you for the service?

Regards.

Because those people already paid for the local streaming functionally. It was included in the price of the hardware.
Not that Nvidia would ever consider those who purchase their product to be "people".
We are just the faceless inhuman mass of Consumer.

 

[kyzarvs]

Hey, Sony had to pay their out a lot of money when they retroactively removed Linux functionality in the PS3. And by "a lot of money" I mean like $6 each to a tiny subset of uses, iirc paid via a valueless game download .... which might not even be downloadable anymore as Sony shuts down old servers.

But I think the more concerning part of the "right to own" fight, is that it looks like Nvidia is canceling all of GameStream. That's a feature/Selling point for all their expensive GPUs, not just their niche streaming box.

Funnily enough I thought about the Sony / Linux episode as well.
But then you think of more instances (Apple slowing down phones as they age, multiplayer connectivity dropping from games, the one that most irked me at the time was Android removing direct USB access so I couldn't use my phone as a USB in my car in the days before Spotify) where nothing happened - this isn't really going to cause any long-term ripples for Team Green. I don't condone it by any means - but I don't think anything significant will happen from it.

 

[helper800]

How many inches will we continue giving? How many miles will they be allowed to take? Probably big numbers...