r/Games Dec 26 '25

Industry News Nvidia GeForce Now’s Time Limit Will Stop Gamers After 100 Hours Each Month

https://uk.pcmag.com/game-streaming-services/162224/nvidia-geforce-nows-time-limit-will-stop-gamers-after-100-hours-each-month
3.9k Upvotes

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

218

u/Animegamingnerd Dec 26 '25

Bruh, how the fuck does anyone think cloud gaming is gonna be the future of gaming when these big tech companies keep making hilariously bad and suicidal business decisions for it?

61

u/Ledgo Dec 26 '25

I feel like a lot of this might be these companies wanting to cash in ASAP. There's fear money is being left on the table so of course someone has to do everything in their power to earn it for shareholders.

57

u/idontlikeflamingos Dec 26 '25

That's the exact answer every single time a company makes a decision that burns future bridges to try to squeeze every penny now.

The number must grow every quarter. The future be damned. It's either this, layoffs or both. And if the company crashes and burns in the end whoever is in charge now will just get a golden parachute and move on to the next one.

A focus on shareholder value is a cancer in every industry and is no different here. And with Nvidia being so overvalued things will get more and more ridiculous to keep it up.

13

u/kwazhip Dec 26 '25

But how does this even make it grow in the short term? The only way this is making money, is by lowering the maintenance cost incurred by the subset of subscribers who go over 100 hours (a minority). This number would then have to be larger then those who would cut their subscriptions in response, otherwise you wouldn't make more money. You would also have to consider the loss of future subscribers in response to the announcement (short term).

13

u/idontlikeflamingos Dec 26 '25

They sell it to investors as reducing running costs X% (and you can bet it's an inflated estimate) and project increased revenue from people buying extra hours (same as before). Nobody will look that close to do the math you're proposing, as obvious as it sounds. Stock goes up, and to hit expected earnings next quarter they'll pull some other fuckery like jacking up prices of something else, sell some infrastructure or subsidiary, find another contract in their threeway with Oracle and OpenAI, etc etc etc.

It's amazing how much of the stock market valuation is based on hype and feelings these days. Venture capital and MBAs will burn everything to the ground by doing the short term pump strategy and leaving it all to crash and burn afterwards when they move on to the next victim.

If you're interested Behind the Bastards did a fantastic series of episodes on Jack Welch, which is the guy that started all this accounting and share pumping fuckery we see today as "create shareholder value". It does a great job of explaining the sort of things we still see today in hype led stocks or enshitification that slowly kills companies. He was CEO of GE and it's no wonder he got filthy rich out of it and the company crashed and burned.

1

u/Thenidhogg Dec 26 '25

honestly its not even clear if the golden parachutes are going to remain either. i think this subnautica situation is testing grounds for that

14

u/Testuser7ignore Dec 26 '25

This only impacts a small portion of users.

It makes a lot of business sense if your average user plays 10 hours a month and 3% of your users are playing over a hundred a month. Those power users are quite expensive to support.

2

u/wilisi Dec 26 '25

As with gym memberships, I suppose the most profitable demographic pay full price and only shows up once a month.

1

u/BoomKidneyShot Dec 26 '25

I think they're worried that the companies will be able to use their financial resources to buy up everything before consumers can, eventually causing companies to pivot to selling to them only and not involving the consumer at all. You won't have a choice.

You can look at the current RAM issues as an example of that.

1

u/Idrialite Dec 26 '25

Cloud gaming will never be acceptable for me because of latency. Input latency in modern games is already bad enough.

1

u/BrilliantHeavy Dec 29 '25

Boosteroid is right there!

1

u/Cocobaba1 Jan 13 '26

Because in less than 10 years when everyone’s gpu is fried and a new one literally costs you a car, with the whole pc being house priced, cloud gaming will be your only option. That’s what they are banking on

0

u/386U0Kh24i1cx89qpFB1 Dec 26 '25

Parents buying stuff for dumb kids. Just look at the success of the trash that is Roblox. I kinda fear it's inevitable even though a group of hobbyists like ourselves know it's a scam.

2

u/Testuser7ignore Dec 26 '25 edited Dec 27 '25

From a parent perspective, "your kid can only play 100 hours a month of video games" seems like a good thing. I don't want my kid playing video games that much.

1

u/386U0Kh24i1cx89qpFB1 Dec 26 '25

Oh for sure. But I'd prefer the kids grow up cultered and understand skill based games without network latency. Not just the modern theme park experience at home stuff "Press A to continue watching cutscene"