Licensing agreements are ruining cloud gaming and developers aren't helping

It shouldn't be this difficult to play games I own.



Are you a fan of The Long Dark? Do you want to play it at odd hours of the night from the comfort of your bed? Or how about when you're on vacation or otherwise just not at home? How about on your phone while you're on your lunch break at work? Cloud gaming makes all of these realities possible. Still, developers like Hinterland Games, Activision-Blizzard, and Bethesda have shown that they don't seem to understand cloud gaming. Whether this is a result of sheer ignorance or simply short-term thinking, customers are finding themselves left out in the cold.

But first, let's rewind and discuss how services like NVIDIA GeForce Now work. When you subscribe to GeForce Now, NVIDIA essentially rents you a virtual machine that you can use as a vehicle to play games. This Windows 10-based virtual machine (VM) looks just like your desktop computer, and you simply sign into Steam or the Epic Games Launcher with your existing account and play ...