Nvidia GeForce Now Free Tier is Getting Pre-Roll Ads

Nvidia is planning to introduce ads on its GeForce Now cloud gaming service this week. The company told The Verge that free users will start seeing ads tomorrow, February 28, when they’re waiting to start their gaming session on GeForce Now.

These pre-roll ads will be up to two minutes long, which isn’t really unbearable. An Nvidia spokesperson also said that the ads will help to make its cloud gaming service sustainable and that the change “will reduce average wait times for free users over time.”

Nvidia’s GeForce Now is probably the best cloud gaming service on the market, and it lets you play some of the games you own on Steam, the Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Connect, and the Microsoft Store for free. If you have a PC Game Pass or Ubisoft+ subscription, some games in the two libraries are also supported.

However, the GeForce Now free tier is severely restricted. Users often have to wait for a long time to get access to a “basic” gaming rig, and game sessions are limited to just one hour. A $9.99/month Priority membership provides access to up to 6 hours of gaming at up to 1080p/60FPS. The $19.99/month Ultimate tier, however, offers up to 8 hours long sessions with a GeForce RTX rig that can play games at up to 4K/120FPS with Ray tracing support.

Operating a cloud gaming service at a global scale as Nvidia does with GeForce Now requires a massive amount of resources. It’s probably no surprise that Nvidia is now trying to monetize free users, and it will be interesting to see if other cloud gaming services will do the same.

Microsoft as an example, currently lets anyone with a Microsoft account play Fortnite on Xbox Cloud Gaming for free. But will that always be the case? Speaking at a conference in November, Xbox’s Chief Financial Officer Tim Stuart suggested that it could make sense to ask gamers in markets where consoles aren’t dominant to watch ads to get free minutes of game streaming.