Could 2023 Be GeForce NOW’s Biggest Year Ever?
While 2022 will go down as one of the slowest years ever for new game releases, 2023 may usher in the biggest launch list in gaming history. With so many titles slated to come out over the next twelve months – including Starfield, Hogwarts Legacy, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor – the upcoming wave of third-party content could also make this the biggest year ever for GeForce NOW.
There’s no denying that 2022 didn’t shape up the way we wanted. Plagued with delays, disappointments, and broken promises, gamers were left largely to root through their backlogs for something to play. Still, 2022 wasn’t a total loss. It brought us Game of the Year contenders Elden Ring and God of War: Ragnarok, as well as my personal favorites, High on Life, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and Need for Speed Unbound.
The thing that disappointed me most about 2022, more so than the slow drip of games, was the absence of cloud platform support. As it stands today, none of the titles mentioned above made it to GeForce NOWvia Steam or the Epic Games Store. Other notable games from 2022 were also MIA, including Lego Star Wars: Skywalker Saga, Monster Hunter: Rise, and Gotham Knights. In fact, outside of the Saints Rowreboot, which was received poorly by reviewers, GFN fell short of getting the games that players wanted to play most.
A Slow Start to 2023
Fast forward to today. So far, GeForce NOW has been off to a slow start, porting over only a handful of indie titles and Ubisoft Steam games that were already available via Ubisoft Connect. This inconvenient fact can be brushed aside for now, as all eyes turn toward the huge RTX 4080 GPU upgrade that’s rolling out to GeForce NOW Ultimate subscribers early this year.
But even as the defunct Google Stadia closes up shop for good on January 18, its erected headstone should be a warning to NVIDIA that fancy streaming tech and powerful hardware are only pieces of the bigger battle. Bringing in great games on a regular basis is also critical to platform growth and sustainability.
GFN’s Biggest Year Ever?
There’s no denying that GeForce NOW is a force to be reckoned with in the cloud gaming space. It’s the oldest platform out there with its beta dating back to October 2015. It currently boasts the biggest library with support for 1,500+ games. It leverages the most GPU power on the market, bar none. And it’s the place where 25 million players from 100 countries go to stream games online. Still, there is one area where NVIDIA continues to struggle, and that’s in widespread game developer support.
At this point, every game that lands on Steam or the Epic Games Store should come with GeForce NOW enabled, but that hasn’t been the case. This is in spite of NVIDIA’s internal efforts to bring more and more developers onto the platform, some of which have paid off while others evidently haven’t. With the 2023 roster stacked for PC, Xbox, and Playstation, NVIDIA has a huge opportunity to make this the biggest year in GFN history. If they’re not already talking to the developers behind 2023’s most anticipated titles, now’s a great time to start up those conversations.
At the end of the day, GeForce NOW has nailed the fundamentals; it’s the champion in streaming stability, latency, regional support, and sheer power. But it needs more games — not just indies and occasional AA entries, but the AAA heavy hitters that hardcore players demand, day and date, no exceptions. If NVIDIA can pull off this monumental feat, they will have solidified their long-standing place as the cloud gaming platform to rule them all. And if they can’t, then one need only look toward Stadia’s freshly polished headstone as a reminder of what can be lost.