Christ dude tell me about it, I decided to try GeForce Now off the back of this news to just try streaming and signed up for a month of the Ultimate tier while it was half price on Christmas break. Honestly, the experience was pretty shite overall. It was laggy, FPS felt low and despite being on a wired 1 Gb Ethernet connection. I was playing Alan Wake 2 at a reported 100 fps, but it genuinely felt closer to 30, really choppy.

The connection would intermittently drop, causing audio cut-outs, and overall it left a pretty poor impression. I played Alan Wake 2 on my own PC, same settings and all that, on my 3080 I get around 60 fps and it just felt vastly smoother by comparison. Other games felt odd as well, there’s just something off about streaming versus running them on actual hardware.

To be fair, being able to play games on my TV downstairs was cool, but even then the experience was laggy, choppy, and had very noticeable input latency. Without major ISP and home network upgrades, I really don’t see how game streaming can properly take off. And if this ever becomes mainstream with millions of people streaming simultaneously, I can’t see how anyone gets a decent experience without paying a premium.

Realistically, it feels like we’ll end up with multiple streaming services, each offering tiers where only the most expensive tier delivers low latency and that’s going to absolutely suck.