Avus wrote on Mar 7, 2020, 15:16:
it is fxxking ridiculous that game developers think they should get a share from a service renting virtual machine to people who put their (PAID) games into it. Game developers really think their customers should double paid for that??
Yeah, but that's a battle long since past winning. Courts have decades of precedence saying that you cannot use display copyrighted works for commercial purpose without permission of the copyright holder. It doesn't matter if it is to one person or many, or if that person already owns a copy of the game. Just as a bar cannot play a movie to its customers or a store use music without getting license, neither can Nvidia stream games. They aren't streaming YOUR game-files onto their virtual machines, after all; they are using a (presumably legally purchased, although at this point I wouldn't even be too sure of even that) copy of the game down to its customers. The fact that Nvidia only allows you to stream games you already own is not a shield.
Why the fxxk these developers not pull their games for the last 2 years?
At least in some cases, Nvidia came to an agreement with the publishers that they could stream the games during the beta phase of GeForce Now. The problem was that NVidia pushed their product out of beta and into public release without making sure all their partners were okay with that. As we've seen, many (most?) of them are not.
Copyright is, I think we can all agree, well out of whack in this country, but in this case it isn't the game publishers being greedy f**cks. They aren't asking for more than the law allows or even pushing the boundaries. Nvidia is the one who screwed up here. I think the fact that so many publishers are unilaterally pulling all their games also indicates that Nvidia isn't being very compromising on their end either.
Arguably, the game publishers could make more money if they stayed with Nvidia, that people with low-end PCs might buy games they otherwise might not just so they can play them on GeForce now. It may very well be that these publishers are being penny-wise and pound-foolish. But morally and legally they are well within their rights to yank their games.