As every year the CES of Las Vegas is full of surprises and big announcements. This year we have seen gadgets as curious as a 2 TB pendrive, as well as the great work of Amazon with Alexa. This competition is always a great showcase for the latest technological innovations, which the manufacturers try to take care of.

One of the most talked about has been NVIDIA. In this edition of the contest has presented its new NVIDIA Shield TV and has kicked off GeForce Now, which will come to personal computers next March. The possibilities it offers make it aspire to become the Netflix of video games, although it is still early to venture anything.

For this GeForce Now has different weapons. How you use them will be crucial to see if you can become a referral service with millions of subscribers. For now, we are going to focus on talking about them.

The technological weapons

For those who do not know GeForce Now, we can say that it is a fully agnostic video game streaming service to the platform that runs them. The device in which the user plays connects through the cloud to NVIDIA supercomputers, which the company says can move each title to sky-high resolutions with excellent image quality.

So far it could only be used with an NVIDIA Shield TV, but as we have already mentioned in March will come to Windows and Mac, something that fans of Apple fans liked . The games that work on this platform can be purchased through the GeForce Now Store, whose catalog you can consult in the game library.

In addition to its own library of games, GeForce Now will be compatible with Steam. This means you will not have to buy new titles to use this service, and saving some money is something that never hurts.

The interesting thing is that even the most technologically demanding games will work in limited computers, since the workload is supported by the manufacturer’s supercomputers and not the user’s. In the final device only a video signal arrives, something very similar to when using an on-demand video platform.

Economic weapons

Everything runs through the cloud and you do not need to have a computer with the latest technology to play. That’s fine, but the prices that NVIDIA is downloading are not for all budgets. According to MSPowerUser, after registration users have free hours of play.

These hours are distributed in two ways : eight hours on a PC with a GTX 1060, or four hours on a PC with a GTX 1080. Once these free hours have passed, the user is only presented with payment options.

For $ 25 more you can buy a bonus hours of play, which are distributed in 20 hours on a PC with a GTX 1060 and 10 on a PC with a GTX 1080. Given how absorbent some titles may become, The price for such a reduced hour bonus seems high.

Failing to prove it and see if it achieves what it promises, on paper at the technological level NVIDIA seems to have what it needs, but where more doubts arise is in the economic field. To try to explain it better, we can do a parallel with an article published in Xataka comparing to Netflix and HBO, highlighting three very important Netflix virtues: it has a good catalog, the subscription price is very competitive and, above all, it is very comfortable .

GeForce Now as an idea is fantastic: who would not want to go on vacation with a very limited netbook and be able to play, say, the new Doom? Any gamer would say “me”, but with bonuses of hours of play so expensive probably more than one will think twice. The comfort is presupposed in the absence of a test, the catalog taking into account that it will be compatible with Steam will also be good, but the price …

Does NVIDIA risk having its project fail with such high prices? It is probable. Maybe when you have no competition in this streaming games you think invincible, but the community of players could turn their back on NVIDIA with this economic approach. Time will tell, for now we can only speculate.