Bio-shocker! 2K Games pulls its titles from Geforce Now

Things keep getting worse for Nvidia’s fledgeling Geforce Now gaming service, as the company confirms that another major publisher is pulling their games from its platform. 

Nvidia has announced that 2K Games’ titles have been removed from Geforce Now, removing the Borderlands series, Civilization 6, the Bioshock franchise and over two dozen more PC titles from Nvidia’s streaming service. 

This announcement comes after Activision Blizzard and Bethesda Softworks pulled their games from the service. These removals are attributed to a lack of a commercial agreement between Nvidia and these publishers. That said, Nvidia’s service doesn’t sell games directly, instead relying on 3rd party storefronts like Uplay, Steam and the Epic Games Store. 

Right now, Nvidia’s offering a 90-day free trial for Geforce now, which will be followed by a $4.99 per month subscription cost. The goal of the service is to provide gamers access to an affordable gaming PC on the cloud. At this time, publishers don’t seem to appreciate the value that this kind of service offers to gamers. 

Earlier this week, Hinterland Studios founder Raphael van Lierop stated that Nvidia didn’t ask permission to add The Long Dark to their Geforce Now service. The studio asked Nvidia to remove their game, stating that “Devs should control where their games exist.”

While developers should control where their games are distributed, it is also arguable that PC gamers should control where their PC games are playable. Geforce Now only offers PC gamers access to games that they already own, from the perspective of a customer, the only difference is that the game is on the cloud, and not on their home computer. On Geforce Now, PC gamers are playing PC games that they own on a PC that they rented. The question now is should developers and publishers be able to stop gamers from playing their PC games on cloud servers.