jhAtgog: Having Prey or Dishonored would probably be completely out of the question, if you wouldn't have had the machine that could run it (and couldn't afford it!), at the time you bought them, right?
AB2012: I have a secondary rig (old HTPC) that was in that situation. Solution = grab a cheap 2nd hand £105 GTX 1060 on Ebay, and it gets +200fps in Dishonored, DX:HR, etc. Even a brand new equivalent (£150 1650S), I'm still struggling to see where the money saving is in subscribing to a £60 / year service when measured over 5 years (£300 streaming vs £150 budget GPU) to avoid the huge restriction of getting kicked out of your games every 60 minutes on the free tier.
This is probably getting too far off the original discussion but just one point:
Your budget rig (which also had to be paid at some time, not only the GPU) and the 1060 might run current stuff right now (with some restrictions), but surely not in two or three years as things usually go. This is a corollary to "Sam Vimes Theory of Economic Injustice" - you would have to pay more often for the cheaper solution.
AB2012: It also brings up the age-old paradox - if someone can't afford even a budget dGPU, then how are they going to afford a lot of AAA games after they start subscribing? If I were in that situation (and I was for a while in my teens) I'd rather buy a couple less expensive games just to be able to run everything else normally, then buy them cheap at a later date when they are old games. Most budget gamers on Youtube have long figured out the best "bang per buck" is grabbing 2nd hand last generation hardware rather than ongoing subscriptions for new Gamer Services. Likewise in the real world many cash strapped students are known to pirate it when their income is low but then buy them legally when their income rises. Can't do that with Streaming services so it's far less appealing and more expensive for that demographic.
There are free-to-play titles which you could grab, there are be giveaways on Humble for example, and on other platforms, too. You can ride with a pretty low profile money.wise, if you really have to. Pirating has been,is, and probably will be always an option, too, there is no denying it.
We running in some kind of arguing clash here where you bring points why this isn't a good idea for some reasons and I bring up certain condition and examples where it might be. I'm pretty sure we won't come to a conclusion here. The only thing that would interest me is: could you agree that some people might have their reasons for wanting to use streaming, which you and I clearly don't?
jhAtgog: Many posters here were using DRM (or more the lack thereof) as an argument against streaming in general which it isn't in my opinion.
AB2012: It's hard to see how Geforce Now specifically would work with GOG without DRM given how it works with Steam / uPlay (DRM'd API's). Even if it were technically possible, I doubt nVidia would pump a large sum of money into recoding it just for GOG, which is presumably why they don't support GOG in the first place. Publisher demands are another issue. If they demand games be DRM'd or removed from the service, guess which nVidia will find more appealing (given they've already lost some major publishers there?...)
I'm not opposed to it as an option on principle, it just seems remarkably limited and overly convoluted vs just buying a budget GPU on credit / 2nd hand once you start measuring "Total Cost of Ownership" (ongoing subscription costs vs one off purchases) over 5 years.
Services like gfn (Geforce Now) would indeed need some kind of "proof of ownership" which steam (and others) provide, before they would let you install games the way they currently handle it, which makes it much more complicated than necessary, I agree. Whether or not the game itself has some kind of copy protection realized on gfn itself really doesn't seem to matter here since free-to-play games work too, so DRM doesn't seem to be a necessary requirement, at least technically.
If publishers would demand that games would have to be DRMed after you bought them on Gog, or do you mean in general on other platforms? As far as Gog is concerned, i doubt that this would be possible in a legal way.
You are right, gfn is currently definitely struggling with publishers who want to get payed at least twice for their games (once for your pc and once for every streaming service you want to play it on, obviously) and remove their games from gfn since gfn isn't a shop system like Stadia. A classic dick move the publishers made there. But yes, i agree that nvidia wouldn't pump large amounts of money in this, especially in their current situation.
I'm still not convinced that your total cost of ownership calculation is entirely accurate here, given that you compare a budget solution (parts of it only, btw.), to a pretty powerful rig you would get from streaming. But yes it still would cost money, and gfn isn't the most expensive by far.
mqstout: The better thing to do would be for Geforce Now to be recoded so the user can run arbitrary executables there of their own choosing, completely eliminating any time to a game library (and also eliminating the fucked-up idea of some publishers saying that consumers can't use a rented cloud GPU).
Absolutely, that would be best for customers and would be the only way I would consider using it maybe. The problem that the concept has some serious privacy issues would still remain though.
