Right after it launched, Nvidia's GeForce Now streaming service lost permission to support many of the big, graphically-intensive games that made it useful. That exodus of publishers—which included Activison, Capcom, and Bethesda—was a serious blow to the service, but a little over a month later, things are starting to look up.
Nvidia has begun announcing support for new games every Thursday, and that regular cadence suggests a certain confidence. The addition of Control with RTX ray tracing support last week and Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord at the start of this week also came as good news.
The same can't be said about every game joining the GeForce Now compatibility list, though. The other games added this week, such as a nine-year-old standalone expansion for the original Mount & Blade, aren't exactly games we were struggling to run on even aging PCs. Here's this Thursday's list of new GeForce Now compatible games in full:
- Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
- Dwarrows
- Jack Orlando: Director's Cut
- Knights and Merchants
- Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword
- POSTAL 2
- SpeedRunners
- The Cycle [Epic Games Store]
- Tropico 5
SpeedRunners and Danganronpa 2 are great games, but who needs to use the latest in cloud streaming technology to play them? They'll run on an old potato growing in your kitchen. I get the sense that Nvidia is scooping up agreements from any publisher it can to boost the size of its library right now, and that scoring big new games may be proving harder than expected.
If you've got an older PC, though, Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord might be a good candidate for GeForce Now streaming. We're having fun in the absurd, violent, freeform medieval sandbox so far, and we'll publish a performance analysis of it soon.
If you're unfamiliar with GeForce Now, it streams games to you like Google Stadia, except you don't have to buy streaming-only versions of the games you want to play. If you already own the game you want to stream on Steam or the Epic Store, and GeForce Now is allowed to support it, you can stream it.
As this lackluster announcement emphasizes, the problem for Nvidia so far has been getting publishers to agree to make their games compatible with the service. While some see GeForce Now as just another way to play legitimately purchased games—a remote computer and nothing more—many publishers clearly see it as Nvidia profiting off of their games, and won't be a part of it without negotiating a deal. For more on the subject, Wes explained the controversy in detail last month.
