What you need to know
- The Long Dark is no longer available to play on NVIDIA GeForce Now.
- Developers requested NVIDIA pull the game because a specific license wasn't requested or granted.
- Many gamers are outraged at both NVIDIA and Hinterland Games, developers of The Long Dark.
Game Director for The Long Dark, Raphael van Lierop, took to Twitter to announce that The Long Dark will no longer be offered on NVIDIA's GeForce Now cloud gaming service. Hinterland Games requested that NVIDIA pull its game from the library of available games on GeForce Now citing that NVIDIA didn't request permission to use the game and therefore has no right to provide gamers access to the title.
The Long Dark is the latest game to be pulled from NVIDIA's virtual cloud gaming service in recent weeks, following Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard. While GeForce Now still enjoys a library of over 500 supported games that can be played on any device with the GeForce Now app, these recent decisions to pull titles from the service makes it a bit less enticing for gamers to choose it over other, similar cloud gaming services.
Sorry to those who are disappointed you can no longer play #thelongdark on GeForce Now. Nvidia didn't ask for our permission to put the game on the platform so we asked them to remove it. Please take your complaints to them, not us. Devs should control where their games exist.Sorry to those who are disappointed you can no longer play #thelongdark on GeForce Now. Nvidia didn't ask for our permission to put the game on the platform so we asked them to remove it. Please take your complaints to them, not us. Devs should control where their games exist.— Raphael van Lierop (He/Him) (@RaphLife) March 1, 2020March 1, 2020
Responses to van Lierop's Twitter post have varied from outrage at NVIDIA for providing access to a game they "didn't license", while others are irritated at the "greed" of Hinterland Games move, citing that GeForce Now is little more than a virtual machine that runs Steam and only provides gamers access to games they already own. Some other cloud gaming services, like Google Stadia, operate more like a console in that games have to be developed specifically for Stadia and cannot be played or accessed any other way, much as an Xbox game that's purchased would only operate on a compatible Xbox system.
A game purchased on GeForce Now is simply a Steam license and can be played anywhere you are able to access Steam, including your own personal computer. NVIDIA has been working to streamline its service over the past few years since it entered beta, including user interface refinements that make it appear less like a "simple" VM running Steam and more like other cloud gaming services. Regardless of how you view this news from The Long Dark developers, NVIDIA is clearly fighting an uphill battle in 2020 as its service fights for supremacy in the cloud gaming wars.
