It sounds exactly how netcafes operate where the public can lease a computer and play games for a few hours. I don't think it's weird they have to get special licenses just like netcafes do.
It sounds exactly how netcafes operate where the public can lease a computer and play games for a few hours. I don't think it's weird they have to get special licenses just like netcafes do.
Do you need to have purchased the game at those cafes? Cause you do at geforce now. Game publishers who withdrew from geforce now are just greedy.
There are a few models.
- They have majority of popular games already installed but you need to log in to your own steam account and only have access to the games you already own.
- They provide an in-house account and offer games available in that account to be played. This is usually for cafes offering playtime for console games.
- Partnerships with games studios/publishers, but really I only know about this in Korean PC Bangs for specific games where some content is locked. For example in League of Legends, you unlock playable characters over the course of playing the game so a low level account might not have the full roster unlocked. If you log in your account to affiliated PC Bangs, you have all characters unlocked while playing there.
Well it is bad user experience. While GeforceNow allos me to connect my steam and epic account, the list of games actually playable is not my collection there, but the subset of games nvidia has a licensing deal (a lot less). Also they are free to remove support for games - as happened when big players withdrew their licensing.
I've seen tech videos from LTT and alike where they build remote gaming rigs using windows Hyper-V with GPU passthrough to the guest - that is essetially what they should do, and let me rent a virtual machine with hardware support and low latency video compression. I don't see a reason you would need any licensing deals there.
That is very different, because the netcafe own those games. This would be like needing to rent the computer at the cafe, bringing your own purchased game, but then the netcafe also needs a license to allow you to play your own games at the computer.