Nvidia’s GeForce Now Is Losing All Activision Blizzard Games

Nvidia’s GeForce Now is a cloud gaming service that lets you play games stored on dedicated GeForce graphics-enabled PCs across a wide array of devices. While it lets you play PC games you already own, the game publisher must allow it on the service. “Today, Nvidia is revealing that Activision Blizzard is no longer playing ball, pulling down its catalog of games including Overwatch, WoW, and the Call of Duty series,” reports The Verge. From the report: That means one of the service’s biggest publishers, as well as its Battle.net catalog of games, will no longer be available just a week after the service’s formal launch — a launch that was already missing many games from Capcom, EA, Konami, Remedy, Rockstar and Square Enix, all of which seemed to have pulled out after Nvidia’s beta period ended. Nvidia wouldn’t tell us why this is happening now, but it’s strange, because Nvidia previously told us it was contacting every publisher ahead of launch to make sure they were OK with their games staying available with the service. Did Activision Blizzard reneg on a deal, or did Nvidia fail to get permission? We’re waiting to hear back from Nvidia; Activision Blizzard didn’t respond to a request for comment. In a statement, Nvidia says it hopes to work with Activision Blizzard to bring the games back, but the company confirmed to us that things are pretty cut-and-dried for now — you shouldn’t expect them to magically reappear after a few days (or even a few weeks) thanks to a deal. Nvidia also declined to tell us whether it’d be open to sharing a slice of its subscription fees with publishers, citing the quiet period before its earnings. It’s true that Blizzard, at least, has an EULA that specifically prevents users from playing a game on cloud gaming services, but that doesn’t seem to explain this move. Activision’s EULA doesn’t contain anything of the sort, and again, Activision Blizzard didn’t seem to have any problem with it during the GeForce Now beta.