Social Distancing Threatens to Overload Game Streaming Services
For NVIDIA’s GeForce Now and services like it, the biggest limitation may be what their own servers can handle
Around this time in 2019, game industry observers were already wondering whether existing home internet could handle bandwidth-heavy game streaming services like Google’s Stadia or NVIDIA’s GeForceNow. Now, as millions of gamers find themselves at home with much more free time on their hands, game streaming services are facing such an increase in demand that some companies are scrambling to keep up.
On March 17, four days after President Trump declared a national emergency in response to the coronavirus pandemic, an NVIDIA forum moderator posted that the company had seen a “substantial increase” in both the number of people signing up for GeForce Now and the time they spent playing. The company says its Founders memberships — which allow for longer play times and priority access for $5 a month — have sold out in Europe. “We still have capacity for Founders members in North America,” NVIDIA told OneZero, “but it’s filling up quickly.”
A Google representative declined to comment on whether Stadia has seen a similar uptick, and Sony’s PlayStation Now hasn’t released any similar information, but video game…
