Publishers Are Running Scared of GeForce Now, But Why?

First Activision Blizzard and then Bethesda; now, 2K join the growing list of major publishers uneasy enough with GeForce Now to back out of the service altogether. Among the games lost in the fallout are the Borderlands, Call of Duty, Civ and BioShock series, although countless more have left in what many are attributing to poor communication on NVIDIA's part.

GeForce Now is a game streaming service that, essentially, provides users remote access to a high-powered PC for the purpose of playing games. This PC can be operated and viewed via the cloud from other PCs, tablets, NVIDIA Shield devices or even smartphones. The service doesn't sell games; instead, it connects to existing game clients (like Steam) and runs the games that a player has already purchased.

Those aforementioned publishers aren't the only objectors mind, only the most recent and highest profile: The Long Dark's developer, Hinterland Studio, removed its popular title alongside a statement from its director claiming "Nvidia didn't ask for our permission to put the game on the platform so we asked them to remove it". In addition, many companies whose games were prominently featured in the service's beta (eg. Square Enix, Capcom and Rockstar) are now nowhere to be seen within its library.

Why? What is it about GeForce Now that's rattled the cages of so many publishers? If players have already forked out the cash for their games, what does it matter if they play them remotely on a PC somewhere in the mysterious realm of NVIDIA?

There doesn't seem to be one clear answer. It seems different companies and individuals have their own beef with the service. Whether a simple lack of developer control, alleged contractual breach or disapproval of the negligible monetary benefit, there's a leaky ship's worth of holes to be poked in NVIDIA's approach to rolling out GeForce Now.

And yet, many companies are sticking by it. Epic's Tim Sweeney, on behalf of his company, endorsed the service "wholeheartedly", praising how he saw it as "the most developer-friendly and publisher-friendly of the major streaming services". On top of that CD Projekt Red's mega-hyped Cyberpunk 2077 will be available on the service from day one: NVIDIA clearly isn't completely without industry support.

NVIDIA is confident that, despite this early exodus of publishers, the service will prove its worth in time and draw the naysaying companies back into the fold. Until then, companies will be free to withdraw their titles from the service as and when they see fit. Of course, nobody wants to see a game's creator lose control of its property, but perhaps humankind's natural skittishness around new technology is once again halting progress. Perhaps we need to collectively close our eyes and take a leap of faith to make this whole thing work.