Rant on this week's change to Amazon Games, GeForce Now, Luna Service, etc

Video Games
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The situation:
Amazon Games is a service that is similar to the Epic Games Service in that it gave a few games away each week (to keep) similar (to Amazon Prime Members) the way Epic has for years. However, that ‘Free to Keep’ service is going away, and being rolled into the alternative Luna Premium Service which is competing with GeForce Now and all the other things that consoles have. To onboard people and (hopefully promote the service) the next few months (rolling out, with them set to sunset in December it looks like) they are offering about 30-40 games, unfortunately it seems you will not be able to keep these games. (You can clearly see a ‘play until End of November/End of December message on the main page of each of them) This has raised the concern that perhaps the games redeemed by Amazon Games subscribers may not be available in the future. Amazon says that we shouldn’t worry. Well, I am worried. (They just laid off a bunch of employees and supposedly it’s due to AI, and competing with AI companies/services.)

Why you should care:
These services are interesting and allow midrange users or low end users to access games that do the heavy lifting on hardware, and since you can tether them to family share accounts (aka friends that own them through packages like humble etc) or free giveaways by Epic, GoG, (occasionally) Steam, and (apparently no longer) Amazon Games, they give you another way to play them. (For me, this translates as a way to play a lot of the heavier-use games in VR through my Oculus Quest).

Some things i’ve learned and some thoughts:
Amazon Luna isn’t bad, but it seems inferior to GeForce Now. I don’t think there is going to be a free service as of this time to anyone who isn’t a prime member (but they might change that to maintain relevance lol) I’ve been playing around and experimenting with both of them the past few days and here’s what I can tell you:

Features and Perks and Connecting with other accounts:
GeForce Now! seems to have better video bitrate and/or color depth for some games. (More on this in a bit)
Luna offers a few exclusives right now not available at GeForce Now (Hogwarts Legacy and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.
You can connect both your luna and GeForce accounts to other online services where you have libraries of games. There is a bit more flexibility to do this (with more services connectable and functional) at GeForce Now than that of Luna, however both have connectability issues:

Connectivity/Support Issues:
Luna Connectibility/Support issues: Won’t seem to connect to Steam or Epic Libraries or Family share.
A handful of GoG games came through (not all are supported)
GeForce Now Connectibility/Support Issues: Steam libraries came through, but Xbox and Epic not really (something of my own doing i think related to MSN privacy) family share seems to be working. HOWEVER, any family share games through steam must be manually added. Many games on Epic also must be manually added (also many epic games are steam exclusives and not available)

Gameplay issues:
Some lag on GeForce Now playing Diablo 4 (more than if natively playing it through Blizzard Client on own hardware) I suspect its because its routing into their servers, and is adding another layer (but i haven’t really tested this) Other handful of games I tested seem to look just as good or better than Luna. I’m currently playing KCD:II on luna (its great) but its got two annoying issues: the first being dark scenes look washed out and blend into surrounding colors in a bad way (often online video will have this problem if the stream quality isn’t top shape) the second is related to the Microsoft Edge Browser with an annoying message when going into in game menus (don’t use edge if possible!)

I figure it’s worth leaving this post with a summary of what I’ve learned and hope it helps others who are confused about this and what’s going on. It’s crappy Amazon is doing this and I think this might result in my cancelling the service because the steadily growing collection of free to keep games offset my costs of all their bundled services i don’t use/don’t care about and somewhat helped justify it, however now that is in jeopardy, and they keep hitching up the fees each year I’m thinking twice about the nature of Amazon.

I feel mixed about this news because I am really not happy about Amazon but am kind of pleased to know that after looking into it I have this option and route through GeForce Now to play stuff that would be laggy and unplayable through a VR Headset as a monitor.

Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts/complains/knowledge on this topic and how they feel about streaming services. I like the idea since I can play with a mid range rig. Another friend couldn’t care less because he has to have the best of everything. And another friend has a a high end rig but likes it because it seems great for cross platform play, playing with his kids on the TV easily, etc (and it does seem to be great and offering the convenience of just switching platforms as you use your account its bound to to play!)

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I think this is a byproduct of the fact that several aspects of the company, including the games division, are not doing as well as Amazon would like, and this is a change that is part and parcel of much larger changes happening related to 30,000 Amazon employees reportedly being laid off.

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When my old computer was steadily falling below the minimum specifications required for newer games, I used GeForce Now for those and it worked well enough for the games I wanted to play.

Despite subscribing to their most expensive service, I found that I had to dive deep into their options to get the best quality. I thought this was abysmal user service. This should have been the default setting.

I even made a spreadsheet comparing the cost of a new rig vs. a monthly subscription and the cost over the lifespan of a PC. I decided that, as long as my old PC worked, I would rather not buy a new one since this setup worked for me. The longer I could avoid buying hardware, the better value for money I would get, and the subscription price wasn’t too high.

Then my PC died beyond repair and they hiked up the subscription price significantly in Germany. This changed the balance so much that buying a new PC became the much better and more sustainable option. I am glad I made this decision.

We now try to avoid Amazon and its services, especially Audible (we were long-time subscribers). We ‘freed’ the Audible books that we had and saved them offline. All of us use e-book readers outside Amazon/Kindle and their e-book format and “freed” the ones from them too.

I think that buying games on Steam/other clients (when there is a deep sale) or GOG is the way forward for me, and avoiding any subscriptions, not just for gaming, is the way forward for the future. It will get worse, they will sqeeze every cent from us and make the services worse in the process to throw the money at AI hoping it sticks.

Of course I was never gaming on mobile and needing to be able to switch easily from one device to a different one. If one is into that GeforceNow and alike might have positive sides I never experienced. I also ever only played single player, so no idea how well it works with online play.

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GeForce Now options, or the game options. I noted that GeForce Now defaults to a dynamic bandwidth and resolution to keep network traffic down, which is probably the best way to go off the bat. Nvidia can’t know if people have bandwidth caps so moderate usage is a good idea. I was able to switch to a consistent bit-rate to improve that knowing that I have nothing to worry about in terms of bandwidth.

They also increased the price here and I dropped to the middle tier. Recently I unsubbed completely because I’m not using it and didn’t want another six months on the books.

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No matter the game settings I set GFN capped the resolution/video quality etc. until I changed the settings via GFN. I used it last early Fall last year, so no idea how things are now. I think I had to choose “custom” in GFN and maybe “use the game’s settings” and then choose the setting I wanted in the game, but it is a while, so not sure if I remember everything correctly.

I know I had to follow a guide on Reddit to get it done and suddenly there was this huge jump in quality and not more latency or any network problems.

Oh and I had to use Edge for setting everything up because it made problems in Firefox. Also a downer.

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That’s what I had to do as well. I set it to custom and increased the streaming bitrate. Otherwise the systems is very conservative, which I think rightfully so because high bitrates could hit people with data caps pretty hard.

But then there is the in-game settings. On the middle tier the platform doesn’t store settings across games. On the highest tier it does. But, when starting a new game I’m pretty sure it defaults to the settings most appropriate to the rig, which is what many contemporary games do on a physical build. I found it about as accurate as playing games at home, whereby sometimes the default settings were perfect, and sometimes I have to adjust settings to get smoother gameplay or crisper images.

All-in-all I didn’t find using GeForce Now very different from using my home computer in terms of config once I increased the streaming bitrate.

I will note that my home rig plays games better than GeForce Now, even when GeForce Now is at the highest tier and supposedly giving you access to a GPU with great VRAM than my 4070 Super. I find that GeForce Now doesn’t quite manage to run games as efficiently as my personal rig, for whatever reason.

And my Steam Deck and Mac are both more than enough to run games on the go, so GeForce Now just isn’t as appealing to me anymore.

I have no love for MS, Edge or Chrome, but I will say that FireFox is really non-compliant in many scenarios, and we have issues with basic things like University users unable to visit things like in-page links in FireFox because FireFox doesn’t comply with certain internet standards. I wish they did, because as an institution FireFox was once the browser we recommended, but it’s increasing standards non-compliance has pushed us to Chrome (:nauseated_face:). Personally I wish more people would use Vivaldi, but it doesn’t have the same visibility compared to Chrome.

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