It would still be risking litigation by doing so.
You need to state a cause of action to initiate litigation in the US. Otherwise you're begging for a summary dismissal.
If my understanding if how GeForce works is correct it seems that the biggest issue is that Nvidia is essentially pirating the games.
Nvidia caches games on their server, you link your Steam account, cached games that you own are activated on a VM for you to stream. That's the issue, Nvidia caching these games without permission.
I assume that if GeForce required you to log into an actual installation of Steam on a VM and actually download each and every game you wanted to play to that VM there wouldn't be an issue here.
Nvidia obviously failed to communicate something with publishers between the beta and the final release.
You do not understand how GFN works.
Because local indie dev Raphael van Lierop, the game director and writer of indie hit The Long Dark, pulled his game too. You gonna call him greedy to?
No one is disputing that money isn't involved here, what I am saying is that the lazy "greedy devs" rhetoric is probably not accurate and missing crucial context, as noted above in a quote that Raphael made. I'm saying it's not that simple.
Yes, I'm going to call him greedy for adding an ex post facto restriction to his game licenses after he sold them.
You don't make your customers spend more $$$ unless you want more $$$.
It's not nice to ask for thousands of people to lose their jobs. :(
It's not nice to demand that millions of people pay more for rights that they already had under existing licenses.
I'm not sure what Fortnite is even doing on Geforce Now, seeing how Epic prefers to be independent from other stores and launchers. Epic is perfectly capable of streaming Fortnite themselves and raking in all the cash from that.
Creating a server farm turned for gaming is expensive. Epic (smartly) doesn't care what people play Fortnite on as long as no one is asking for a cut of Fortnite sales.
Devs be hungry.
I can't see how Nvidia will get them back on for free. Doesn't seem like a simply "Please allow your games on the service" will suffice. Nvidia makes between $0 and $4.99 per customer depending if they use the free model or not. And unless Nvidia starts being able to track its users and removes access to the Steam program from being used (you can load up the full program and select games) there isn't a way of finding what the user is actually playing on their account.
If this service survives, Nvidia will end up charging its customers more (probably closer to the Shadow's pricing structure) just to pay devs.
If Nvidia decides to pay devs (which would be the opposite of the standard console and mobile model where devs pay platform fees to be on them) it would cost more than Shadow.
GFN is only cheap because Nvidia already has the server farms setup for professional work. This is very likely a side project that is using spare cycles.
If Nvidia offers streaming copy, publishers can't negotiate exclusive deals with platforms like Stadia, xCloud, PSnow, Apple Arcade etc. that actually give some money for having their games there.
Stadia asks for a licensing fee, like other game consoles.
The others you list rent you a preselected list of games.
GFN does neither.
This argument makes no sense. GFN isn't hardware, it's a streaming solution for games.
If I'm building a tablet that works with iOS apps, I probably should contact Apple first. I certainly shouldn't get pissy when they ask me to stop.
As long as you didn't copy Apple IP, Apple couldn't do squat. You can make a device that is compatible.
It's really not if you think about how content is licensed for streaming. Netflix doesn't pay per movie, they pay a company like Warner Bros for an entire catalogue. That catalogue becomes less valuable when someone allows you to remote into a computer somewhere to watch a dvd of Harry Potter since it's no longer a driver for you to subscribe to Netflix.
This is the exact same thing. For every person streaming Call of Duty, Activision loses a bit of money on their streaming licenses to companies that would want it since it's no longer a driver to subscribe.
In your example the customer has gone to the store and bought a DVD of the movie. And today, said customer can copy said DVD to a Plex server, and stream it to themselves remotely.
And it is all legal.
Yep seems pretty obvious at this point.
If they had a legal right I would imagine by now Nvidia would have refused to remove them to stop the bleeding. It's either that or the damage to the relationships for exercising that option would be too damaging long term to consider so they are instead taking the games off the service. Either way the result is the same.
It is the latter. Nvidia values dev relationships more than legal rights.
GFN isn't a major play for Nvidia.
Nvidia probably thought devs would think it was cool, and that consumers would think it was cool, and it would grow the market because devs didn't have to pay licensing fees, consumers used the games they owned, new consumers with shitty PCs (or Macs) would buy more PC games, and Nvidia would offset some of its server farm idle cost.
Nvidia miscalculated the dev desire for $$$ for everything.
I did this in the other thread, but this take is absolutely wrong.
What Nvidia is doing constitutes a public performance. They need permission from the rightsholder for what they are doing. They don't have it.
And it was pointed out in the other thread why you were wrong, and how if you do treat this as a TV comparison Nvidia is correct, and you went silent after that.
You are a member of the public signing up to a service Nvidia is providing. Nvidia is performing copyrighted work in many places at many times for the public - i.e. not internal employees or owners or anyone else with a private interest in the company.
You have the right to perform the copyrighted work for yourself, you don't have the right to ask Nvidia to perform it for you. They need their own license.
Nvidia is not doing a public performance any more than a cable company with a cloud DVR is giving a public performance.
No it doesn't. Look at what I actually said.
Aereo was claiming that they weren't making a public performance because they were giving each user their own hardware and only leasing out hardware. The user was directing and controling that hardware. The courts rejected that argument.
The TV part of their argument was that cable companies in the USA have carved out a copyright exception. They are able to take local OTA TV signals and transmit them on their cable networks. That is also a public performance, but they have an exception that allows them to do it. Aereo claimed if what they were doing was a public performance, they should enjoy the same protection. Obviously they lost.
Only the first half of their argument was specific to TV. Their argument was literally the same argument people are making around GFN - that they were just leasing out hardware, and that everyone had their own arial, hard drive, and therefore DVR service.
You really need to read the Aereo decision and not just online summaries.
The USSC went to great pains to ensure that the Aereo decision was narrowly tailored to apply to Aereo and would not overturn prior cases in the cloud arena.
USSC said:
"We have not considered whether the public performance right is infringed when the user of a service pays primarily for something other than the transmission of copyrighted works, such as the remote storage of content."
This is the USSC being very explicit about making a very narrow decision on Aereo.
Why does NVIDIA even comply with them then?
Because Nvidia values dev relationships (and its core hardware business) over a side project.
Could a lawyer explain to me the difference between Geforce Now and the pc rental service Shadow. Will they be in trouble as well?
Nvidia is a bigger, better known company that makes graphics hardware as a primary business. It only started renting cloud gaming PCs on the side recently.
Shadow rents cloud gaming PCs as its primary business.
Bad take. You can play all your games on a remote PC. But Geforce Now is not that, it's a gaming platform.
GFN is a remote PC.
Well, why does NVIDIA get to control what games I play? why do they even get a say? If I'm just renting a PC, why can't I just install the games myself?
You could install whatever you wanted in the beta.
Nvidia has an install whitelist to:
1) Prevent people from using the machine they are renting to do things like installing crypto miners or spam software.
2) Allow it to block users from installing games from dev partners who ask because Nvidia wants to keep partners happy.
Keep in mind, this is a service that is renting you a specialized set of hardware at below cost. There will be some limits.
