Nvidia’s cloud gaming service, GeForce Now, is set to be upgraded next month. Its servers will chuck the current GPUs and replace them with shiny new RTX 5080 cards. With this hardware upgrade also comes a new experimental feature from Nvidia’s partnership with Discord and Epic Games.
The experimental feature enables prospective gamers to immediately try a game via Discord before they fork over their dough.
Nvidia will show off the feature in what it calls a ‘technology demo’ at Gamescom this week. The first game playable this way will be Fortnite.
Nvidia try-before-you-buy
“You can simply click a button that says ‘try a game’ and then connect your Epic Games account and immediately jump in and join the action, and you’ll be playing Fortnite in seconds without any downloads or installs,” Nvidia product marketing director Andrew Fear tells The Verge.
From the looks of things, clicking the ‘try game’ button will open an instance of the game in a Discord client, presumably rendered in the cloud by Nvidia’s GeForce Now servers. While the process sounds simpler than the current alternative, there are still requirements, like having an Epic Games account. Then there are the game publishers and developers that need to get on board before this experiment enjoys wide success.
This isn’t the first time a try-before-you-buy feature has been tested. Sony tried it with its acquisition of Gaikai in 2012, and Google tried it with its ill-fated Stadia service. In the former’s case, it quietly went away because it turns out game publishers would rather people buy their games than play them for free, even if that’s only briefly. Hopefully, with these big companies behind it, the experiment might bear fruit down the line.
