It used to be much better, but publishers cracked down on it when it started gaining traction.

I think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license on what is essentially rented cloud hardware. IP laws have come to stifle the very innovation they were supposed to protect.

> I think it's ridiculous that a publisher can prevent me from using my license

I'm still not over the fact we are all buying licences instead of copies.

Legally it's far from clear they can, but Nvidia entered a market where they can't afford to piss off game makers from their legacy business and folded on it.

This is probably what prevented the Stadia team from doing the same thing. Lot‘s of people saying: „why not partner with valve/steam for their library“. Because it‘s not Valves library to begin with. This was inevitable. No publisher cared about GFN playing their games in the cloud in the beginning. Just like studios sold off their content to Netflix for pennies in the beginning. It was free money and they didn‘t have a use for them anyways.

Now they smell money and opportunity to fleece a bigger company for higher fees. It happens all the time, unfortunately.

That‘s why it‘s pretty disappointing that stadia killed their first party studios. You have to produce your own content (like netflix) or at least partner with publishers to be exclusive or simple. This seems to be happening with Ubisoft.

But MS just has such a massive advantage with Gamepass.

So, I'm wondering, why doesn't google supply us with a desktop in the cloud, you can do whatever you want with it, but it has a nice graphics card so you can install steam on it if you want or origin or whatever. You download the game there and play that way. Publishers can't stop that can they?

Well, it would still be linux presumably. MS would likely not allow them to use Windows that way. Or they‘d make it prohibitively expensive. In any case there‘d be even less differentiation from xcloud.

Shadow does offer Windows VM‘s. It works pretty well, but it‘s also quite expensive and not really generally available.

GFN offers something unique: you can connect to existing stores like steam and play many of the games you already own there over GFN. This is a big deal.