I have no idea about copyright laws on this or if this is a stupid question but...
Do I not have the right to access my games through a remote computer? I've already bought the game to show my sincere support to your product and just paying Nvidia to access them through a storefront by streaming.
Is this about you guys needing a piece of the pie? Am I just buying a license or an actual product on the storefronts? What do I own?
Educate me.
I'm not going to debate the morality of it, but from the information I've consumed from devs commenting on it and lawyers giving a TLDR of this stuff:
Reasons:
a. Artistic control of the product
b. distribution agreement concerns
c. the service violates EULAs
d. said publisher has its own service in the works and would rather use that
e. all of the above
Also - The idea that the decision making of whether or not you can access your game from the service being one of
ONLY money is total shit. There's nuance involved here that people are not going to want or care to consider. That doesn't mean that they didn't do it in part for money, but its not the only reason.
And before someone tells me that developers and publishers don't control where you can play your game, they do. Your game is
license it is not technically owned by you. As Steam puts it in their EULAs, you are buying essentially subscription to the content that is non-exclusive and limited.
Here's Nvidia confirming that publishers (aka the rights holder of the IP) can control if the game exists on GeForce Now
For developers, we used our beta phase to show how GeForce NOW could expand a game's audience to low-end PC laptops, Mac computers, Android devices and, soon, to Chromebooks, without any porting effort.
For publishers, we connected gamers directly to game stores, so they maintain control of their content and we stay out of their economics.
Source
And if you don't want to take my word for it, here's Hoeg Law's take on the matter. They are licensed to practice in Michigan.
"As you know, a developer owns the copyright to their game, and they don't lose the rights associated with that copyright when they license their game to a 'buyer,'" Hoeg continued. "And games are, in general, licensed and not sold, with terms related to that license applied to the 'buyer.' Most of these are known or otherwise non-controversial ('you won't reverse engineer this product,' 'you won't use it to post speech we find hateful.' But some are probably less well known. Most licenses are going to say (some version of) 'you have the right to play a single copy of the game on a personal computer/system in your control' and you can't use your copy for "commercial access, use your copy to run an arcade, etc.' So in this case, the Long Dark folks (and probably Steam, GoG, Epic above that too) have similar language in their EULAs, and Nvidia probably should have gotten permission."
Source
Here's the video where they also dive into it.
