Apple:

Our customers enjoy great apps and games from millions of developers, and gaming services can absolutely launch on the App Store as long as they follow the same set of guidelines applicable to all developers, including submitting games individually for review, and appearing in charts and search. In addition to the App Store, developers can choose to reach all iPhone and iPad users over the web through Safari and other browsers on the App Store.

Google offered no comment about Stadia support via iOS, but a Microsoft spokesperson sent over the following response.

Microsoft:

Our testing period for the Project xCloud preview app for iOS has expired. Unfortunately, we do not have a path to bring our vision of cloud gaming with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to gamers on iOS via the Apple App Store. Apple stands alone as the only general purpose platform to deny consumers from cloud gaming and game subscription services like Xbox Game Pass. And it consistently treats gaming apps differently, applying more lenient rules to non-gaming apps even when they include interactive content. All games available in the Xbox Game Pass catalog are rated for content by independent industry ratings bodies such as the ESRB and regional equivalents. We are committed to finding a path to bring cloud gaming with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to the iOS platform. We believe that the customer should be at the heart of the gaming experience and gamers tell us they want to play, connect and share anywhere, no matter where they are. We agree.

Whether or not you actually use the Freestyle filters, the update means that NVIDIA is aligning its streaming service a little closer to its native gaming experience. At the very least, you’ll miss out on one fewer feature if you opt for GeForce Now over a high-end graphics card.

Elsewhere, NVIDIA has added Highlights support to Destiny 2. The feature uses smart pattern and image recognition to automatically detect and capture important gameplay moments, so you can share them elsewhere later without having to remember to manually create clips.

NVIDIA’s GeForce Now is still bleeding game support despite recent additions. The GPU maker has revealed that all titles from Warner Bros., Xbox Game Studios, Codemasters and Klei will lose support for the game streaming service on April 24th. The news came tucked into a post meant to highlight support from big names like Bandai Namco, Bungie, Epic Games and Ubisoft — clearly, some creators are happier than others.

The service has lost games from multiple publishers since its early February launch, including 2K Games, Activision Blizzard and Bethesda. More games have come to the cloud gaming service at the same time, but it’s evident that there isn’t broad-based industry support. It isn’t surprising that Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios left, at least. Project xCloud will be a direct competitor to GeForce Now when it’s ready — Microsoft doesn’t have as much incentive to stick with NVIDIA’s platform as other game creators.

GeForce Now users can also play Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Dungeons 3, Headsnatchers, IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad, Jagged Alliance 2 – Wildfire and The Guild 3 through the service. In addition, NVIDIA said that users can look forward to seeing more games added to the platform every Thursday.

This is one of the first positive developments for NVIDIA’s game streaming service in a while. It has lost access to a huge list of games since it went live for all users in February. Activision Blizzard pulled all its games from the platform, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Overwatch and World of Warcraft a few days after it launched. Bethesda followed soon after, which means GeForce Now also lost access to titles like Skyrim, Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. Borderlands, Civilization, BioShock, XCOM and 2K Games’ other franchises left the platform earlier this month, as well.

GeForce Now’s library suffered one tremendous blow after another almost as soon as the service came out of beta. Activision Blizzard pulled its games just a few days after it went public, because it apparently wanted a commercial agreement with NVIDIA. Shortly after that, Skyrim developer Bethesda followed suit.

NVIDIA didn’t release an official statement this time around, but when Bethesda exited, GeForce Now general manager Phil Eisler said:

“As we approach a paid service, some publishers may choose to remove games before the trial period ends. Ultimately, they maintain control over their content and decide whether the game you purchase includes streaming on GeForce NOW. Meanwhile, others will bring games back as they continue to realize GeForce NOW’s value (stay tuned for more on that).

As the transition period comes to completion, game removals should be few and far between, with new games added to GeForce NOW each week.”

In a recent post on the NVIDIA blog, GeForce Now general manager Phil Eisler said:

“As we approach a paid service, some publishers may choose to remove games before the trial period ends. Ultimately, they maintain control over their content and decide whether the game you purchase includes streaming on GeForce NOW. Meanwhile, others will bring games back as they continue to realize GeForce NOW’s value (stay tuned for more on that).

As the transition period comes to completion, game removals should be few and far between, with new games added to GeForce NOW each week.”

Just a few days ago, the service also lost access to Activision Blizzard’s titles due to what NVIDIA calls a “misunderstanding.” The developer apparently wanted a commercial agreement with NVIDIA, which is now hoping to mend the relationship and offer its games again.

NVIDIA didn’t explain why Bethesda’s games will no longer be part of GeForce Now. But if its absence on the platform doesn’t bother you, then you can sign up for a free or a paid account, since the service came out of beta in early February. The latter option, called Founders membership, costs $5 a month for a year, though the first three months are free.

In heated Twitter threads and editorials about the newest and most controversial gaming platforms around, the DRM-free bit of NVIDIA’s news seemed to barely register with fans. A feature that would’ve made headlines in 2010 is often relegated to a single sentence at the base of the inverted pyramid, or not mentioned at all.

That’s because, over time, we got used to DRM. Every major gaming platform today relies on DRM, with companies like Valve, Epic Games, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo owning players’ libraries in some form. In a digital-first ecosystem, it’s just easier this way.

Players weren’t so agreeable when it came to SecuROM, the granddaddy of DRM. Publishers started using the anti-piracy software in earnest around 2007, when physical discs and midnight GameStop release parties were all the rage. SecuROM was a flashpoint of controversy particularly in the launches of BioShock, Mass Effect and Spore, limiting the number of times these titles could be installed and forcing players to routinely connect to the internet for authentication. By 2010, Ubisoft was pushing always-on DRM for games including Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter-Cell: Conviction, requiring players to maintain a constant internet connection, even for offline play. Ubisoft’s approach to DRM routinely broke the games it was built to protect and the response from players was unanimously negative.

Players called SecuROM punitive and hostile, and wondered why they needed an internet connection to play these games offline. EA, 2K, Ubisoft and other publishers tweaked their anti-piracy systems in response to mobs of criticism. Spore publisher EA faced a class-action lawsuit over the game’s SecuROM features.

Meanwhile, Valve was building out Steam. The storefront was initially designed to streamline the patch process for games like Counter-Strike, and also make it easier for Valve to implement anti-piracy and anti-cheat measures. Steam was built to be a DRM machine.

Valve made Steam a requirement in 2004 with the launch of Half-Life 2 — anyone who wanted to play the game, even those with physical copies, had to launch the client first. Players balked at the move, but Half-Life 2 had enough hype to sustain this plan, and Steam continued to grow. As Valve added dozens and then thousands of third-party games to its store over the years, the company implemented features like offline play and Family Sharing to assuage fans that had been burned by bad DRM practices.

Valve is too big to fail.

More importantly, Steam made buying games easy. Instead of picking up discs and typing out long CD keys, Steam offered one-click access to a massive lineup of new releases and old classics. Players bought into this online-first system entirely, and today, Steam has 1 billion registered users and 90 million monthly active players. Despite determined competitors like GOG (a longstanding DRM-free gaming hub) and the Epic Games Store, it’s the undisputed leader in digital distribution.

Steam still runs on DRM. Even in offline mode, players still need to connect with the Steam client to launch any of their games. As it stands, if Steam shut down today, everyone’s libraries would become instantly unplayable.

Generally, users are OK with this threat — after all, it’s Valve. It’s the company that made DRM palatable in the 2000s. It’s the multibillion-dollar corporation led by benevolent nerd king Gabe Newell. It’s the studio behind Half-Life, Portal, Dota 2, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike. Valve is too big to fail.

As someone who entered college at the height of the Great Recession, that phrase still sends shivers down my spine.

In its final form, Geforce Now is a subscription service with a free and a paid tier. The free option allows folks to connect to NVIDIA’s servers and play for one hour at a time. After an hour, these players will need to reconnect, and potentially wait for a spot to open up on the servers. In the paid tier, players will be pushed to the front of the line when logging on, they’ll stay online for up to four hours and they’ll have exclusive access to NVIDIA’s RTX platform. At launch, the upgraded option is called a Founders membership, and it costs $5 a month for the year, with three free months to kick things off.

NVIDIA is clear that the $5-per-month rate is a discount on the full subscription price, but it hasn’t said what the Geforce Now premium tier will cost post-sale.

“It will be higher than that,” an NVIDIA spokesperson told Engadget at CES in January. “We haven’t decided what number it’s going to be yet. But this is kind of the next level for Geforce Now. So this, we’re going to be focused on for the next probably three to six months, and then we’ll worry about what comes after that.”

One of NVIDIA’s big promises with Geforce Now is that players will actually own the games they buy, rather than paying to access a library that disappears if they end their subscription. If a player leaves the service for good, all the games they purchased will still be accessible through Steam, the Epic Games Store or other existing platforms. DRM-free, baby.

DRM-free, baby.

This is in contrast to Google Stadia, which hosts players’ games entirely in the cloud. With Stadia, players have to purchase (and repurchase) every game they want to play via Google’s storefront, and this library isn’t downloadable. If you lose access to Stadia, you lose those games. Microsoft xCloud employs a similar system, though the service is still in preview.

“I think our strategy of the games is quite different,” an NVIDIA representative said. “It’s connecting to your existing accounts in the cloud, so PC games in the cloud. We’re not creating a new game store where you have to re-buy your content and it’s locked to our platform. This is your existing PC games on your Steam that you already own. So if you have a large Steam account, this seems like a natural choice for you really.”

Geforce Now is supported in 30 countries, with nine data centers in North America and six in Western Europe, which NVIDIA says are all capable of delivering 20-millisecond latency. In Korea, Japan, Russia and other locations, NVIDIA has partnered with telecommunications companies to deliver a claimed latency of 10 milliseconds to these players.

Even in the paid tier, NVIDIA limits gaming sessions to four hours, and this feature serves a few purposes. For one, it ensures that the people connected to the cloud are actually using it to play games.

“We just found 99 percent of people aren’t playing longer than that,” a spokesperson said. “One of the things that we try to control is non-gaming use, like people mining and things like that that really aren’t gaming. …And we found that at that point, at four hours, most people need a bio-break or something. So it’s not really interrupting their gameplay.”

NVIDIA developers expect free-tier players will have to wait longer during primetime gaming hours, like at eight or nine o’clock at night, though they hope even then it won’t be a huge delay. However, if this wait time pushes more players to upgrade to the paid tier, all the better for NVIDIA and the service overall.

“Ideally it wouldn’t be a long wait and we’re going to try to manage it that way,” a representative said. “But you know, this revenue stream will help us grow the capacity of the servers. Right? We need the revenue stream to grow the capacity so people don’t have to wait. So it sort of depends on a certain percentage of people becoming new paid members.”

More than 300,000 people have tested Geforce Now over the years, and these existing accounts will automatically be transitioned to the free tier, with the option to upgrade at the discounted rate. Geforce Now offers hundreds of games from more than 50 publishers, with a lineup of more than 30 free-to-play titles — yes, including Fortnite.