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Comment by lonelappde | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, Nvidia GeForce Now is rounding up users with the tried and true freemium strategy with a 100% free tier to remove psychological barriers to sign up.

There's only one reason to not do that: if your platform can't actually handle having users.

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I haven't tried GeForce Now (but I have played ~300 hours so far on Stadia), but from what I've seen on Twitter they have some kind of waitlist for servers before free users are allowed to start playing a game (and paying users just jump to the front of that line), and then they can only play for one hour at a time (6 hours for paying users). That makes me think they might not have as many servers as they'd like people to think from such a freemium strategy at first glance.

GFN isn’t selling games, so they need to be more willing to degrade the free tier.

Stadia is selling games, so the service should do its best to get out of its users way as much as possible.

I tired GeForce Now for about 30 minutes and found the latency to be unbearable. On a more than gigabit fibre connection right next to their data center.

I barely find Steam link playable on my home wired network.

Same experience here, do not enjoy fast paced games over streaming, and can't imagine what is would be over the internet... Image quality also take a hit obviously, video compression isn't magic.

Agreed.

Though it works perfectly for party games where even a second or two latency is tolerated, like the Jackbox party games.

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