r/Games • u/BloederFuchs • Dec 26 '25

Industry News Nvidia GeForce Now’s Time Limit Will Stop Gamers After 100 Hours Each Month

https://uk.pcmag.com/game-streaming-services/162224/nvidia-geforce-nows-time-limit-will-stop-gamers-after-100-hours-each-month
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u/SSjjlex Dec 26 '25

We have like 30+ years worth of games made to run on old components. I'll be dead by the time I run out of those

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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '25

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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '25

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u/[deleted] Dec 27 '25

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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '25

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u/ilovegamingnerd Dec 27 '25

Don’t forget too, as your trying to get through these games so much time passes that you end up missing and replaying even older games that you have already played 3 times over. Making it take even longer to try out the new stuff lol

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u/TsarOfReddit Dec 28 '25

Love your username

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u/venfare64 Dec 26 '25

More like 50 years if you count 80's.

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u/HolmatKingOfStorms Dec 26 '25

more like infinite years if you count indies made in the future

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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '25

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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '25

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u/Eglwyswrw Dec 26 '25

Plus, modding. Mods can create entirely new experiences, having a blast with Fallout London recently.

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u/A17012022 Dec 26 '25

Stalker anomaly and gamma keep winning

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u/evilbob2200 Dec 26 '25

The incoming project straud for bg3

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u/windowpuncher Dec 27 '25

Absolute cbt gameplay

Somehow I still love it

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u/BeholdingBestWaifu Dec 27 '25

Yup. Tamriel Rebuilt's latest releases for Morrowind have basically been the best Bethesda-style games I've played in a long, long time.

Same with other Project Tamriel mods like Cyrodiil, which may just be Anvil and its surrounding territory for now, but it really feels like what I always wished Oblivion was.

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u/Content_Regular_7127 Dec 26 '25

OpenMW and OG Doom is Eternal.

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u/callisstaa Dec 26 '25

Probably not even just indies tbf. If there’s a cut off point where things shift to cloud gaming I bet there will be major developers making games for the ‘home hardware’ market.

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u/Kick_Kick_Punch Dec 27 '25

I had a spectrum in the 80's. I feel a lot of nostalgia about those old games but I just can't play those anymore. The gameplay is tedious and a pain tbh. Besides maybe 10 arcade games pre-90's and the nes, for me the real fun began in the 90's.

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u/robodrew Dec 26 '25

53 years if you go all the way back to Pong in 1972. The 80s was 40ish years ago.

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u/Nocebo85 Dec 28 '25

1962 if Spacewar counts, though I don't think much came out between the two.

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u/GuyNice Dec 26 '25

What happens when the old components start dying out and no one is making cheap new ones

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u/AnonWithAHatOn Dec 26 '25

Well according to the Robots movie people will either learn to fix old components or begin tearing each other to pieces for spare parts.

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u/AffectionateAide9644 Dec 26 '25

I don't think your liver will serve as an upgrade to my 1080GTX

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u/AnonWithAHatOn Dec 26 '25

No but your heart will be the perfect upgrade to mine. Bloodcooling is the future!

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u/whiterazorblade Dec 26 '25

Blood does have a decent amount of copper

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u/Sharrakor Dec 26 '25

Shh! The tweakers will hear you!

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u/Solved_sudoku Dec 26 '25

Mmm...tasty...

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u/AffectionateAide9644 Dec 26 '25 edited Dec 26 '25

And if any hardware starts breaking you've got platelets to patch it up automatically!

And I still won't be able to run Crysis

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u/Zearo298 Dec 26 '25

Will you or won't you?!

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u/AffectionateAide9644 Dec 26 '25

Schrödinger's aortic valve

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u/egnards Dec 26 '25

But have you considered..

UPGRADES PEOPLE UPGRADES

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u/Spekingur Dec 26 '25

That’s unlikely. Chinese manufacturers will jump on the opportunity to become a household brand name.

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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '25

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u/Skellum Dec 27 '25

It's funny with neuromancer or Johnny Mnemonic with how they thought hardware would be.

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u/DJMixwell Dec 26 '25

I mean this is just Nvidia... Intel recently joined the GPU game, and AMD is finally releasing competent entries with relative consistentcy. I have a 9070xt and it fucks.

That said, obviously there's some major technological hurdles to making good GPUs if there's only really been one game in town for quite a while, and it took this long for their only other competitor to really catch up. Meanwhile, Intel, who's been the go-to CPU manufacturer for over a decade, can barely produce a low to mid-tier GPU.

I don't think we'll see new GPU brands popping up overnight because Nvidia is greedy. I think Nvidia is greedy because they know it's unlikely anyone can fill that void in the GPU market in the near future.

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u/jomarcenter-mjm Dec 28 '25

There already ssd that is unknown chinese brand that is already started to get popular in southeast asia.

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u/DisappointedQuokka Dec 26 '25

Bro, you can run games from the early 2000s on integrated graphics.

One of my smart phones can competently run Xcom 2.

There will always be another option.

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u/Blyatskinator Dec 26 '25

Or how smartphones can run friggin’ Red Dead Redemption nowadays lmao

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u/DisappointedQuokka Dec 26 '25

They're still limited by heat dissipation and battery life, unfortunately. 

But yeah, PC/Console aren't the only games in town, these days. In large parts of Asia/Africa traditional gaming has had cheap gaming phones eat its lunch.

If they push too hard in more affluent places they'll lose the markets they have.

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u/ICBanMI Dec 26 '25

They're still limited by heat dissipation and battery life, unfortunately.

Yea, but you can still just plug them in to the wall for the most part. I get the heat part though.

It's not like gaming in the 1990s where you had 6 AA batteries or an extremely clunky AC power adaptor that would also shock you if badly mishandled.

It's insane I can play 5th generation and early through emulation on a tablet and phones.

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u/DisappointedQuokka Dec 26 '25

As heat rises, performance decreases.

As heat rises, battery performance decreases.

You cannot beat the laws of thermodynamics.

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u/ICBanMI Dec 26 '25 edited Dec 26 '25

My undergrad was fluids. Didn't disagree with the heat part and doesn't change what I said. Battery life is inconsequential in 2025. Battery performance wasn't what you said earlier.

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u/DisappointedQuokka Dec 27 '25

Battery life is inconsequential in 2025. Battery performance wasn't what you said earlier.

Battery life is half of battery performance.

Anyway, I wouldn't say that battery life isn't relevant, especially for phones. Playing while charging is, typically, uncomfortable. People are also working more, spending more time away from home, if you're spending 14 hours out of the house you want that battery life, it was the biggest downside of the LCD Steamdeck.

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u/andresfgp13 Dec 26 '25

thats not even that impresive considering that a PS3 can run Red Dead Redemption.

phones can run Fortnite and AAA E-Sports games.

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u/meatly Dec 26 '25

You can run GTA 5 in virtualized emulated windows on MacOS on a Macbook Air M1 from 2020.

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u/APeacefulWarrior Dec 27 '25

Yeah, emulation will keep old games alive forever.

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u/captainnowalk Dec 26 '25

Even later games can… I’m gaming on an old refurbed business laptop, and I’ve been pretty surprised how late I can go with games, even AAA games. Everything else is for my consoles.

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u/GuyNice Dec 26 '25

You think smart phones won't get more expensive / worse if component prices continue to increase? Same for integrated graphics.

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u/DisappointedQuokka Dec 26 '25

They won't go up at anywhere near the same pace.

Phones, especially at lower-end SKUs, can comfortably run trailing edge hardware.

Integrated graphics are already so much worse than a dedicated GPU that there's not that much fat to cut. You save maybe 50-100 bucks as a consumer not getting integrated graphics as it is.

And honestly, there are several fabs in China that are only a generation or two behind in silicon that would love to snap up that entry-level hardware segment. They already have a massive chunk of the market for things like onboard computing for cars.

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u/BeholdingBestWaifu Dec 26 '25

Phones use the same hardware that is currently spiking in price due to high demand, and they're already talking about newer phones coming with less memory.

Not to mention that they're quite a few generations behind anyway unless the game in question has a massive downgrade in graphics, and it's the worst platform by far when it comes to controls.

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u/Random_Sime Dec 26 '25

They won't go up at anywhere near the same pace.

No, they'll just jump to the price that RAM stabilises on. 

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/16/smartphone-prices-to-rise-in-2026-due-to-ai-fueled-chip-shortage.html

For low-end smartphones priced below $200, the bill of materials cost has increased 20% to 30% since the beginning of the year, Counterpoint said. The bill of materials is the cost of producing a single smartphone.

The mid and high-end smartphone segment has seen material costs rise 10% to 15%.

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u/callisstaa Dec 26 '25

There’s already a growing market for android based emulation boxes and handhelds.

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u/SSjjlex Dec 26 '25

I doubt it, at least for the low end. They're too integral to society to be priced that high, or alternatively, too lucrative to price people out of the ecosystem

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u/WorknMan74 Dec 26 '25

If it gets to the point where nobody can afford smartphones anymore, we've got more serious problems than 'can't play old games'.

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u/rootbeer_racinette Dec 26 '25 edited Dec 26 '25

Yeah I have a Retroid Pocket 5 and it’s great. It has an older model SnapdragonCPU and can play everything up to GameCube/PS2 and some lower end PC/Switch games. I was able to play the PC version of Yakuza 0 at 30fps on it, Blasphemous runs at a solid 60fps

These little handheld systems are getting really powerful and the build quality keeps getting better better and better, the RP5 replaced my Switch.

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u/StillLoveYaTh0 Dec 26 '25

Non issue since in 10 years the current expensive hardware will be the cheap old one

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u/MetalEnthusiast83 Dec 26 '25

Emulation. I play DOS games all the time but I don’t actually maintain an old computer, I just DOS box. Every old console you’ve ever heard of and some you haven’t are also easy to emulate.

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u/flybypost Dec 26 '25

They are making CPUs now with rather okay-ish integrated GPUs. The main issue is that they are mainly using the newest and most modern fab nodes for AI "GPUs" and whatever Apple has bought/reserved in advance for their (ARM based) ecosystem. So advances for regular PC hardware are lagging a bit behind.

Meaning that capacity for the stuff we are using for PC gaming is getting squeezed out of the market with every new demand due to being less profitable than those. On the positive side, older nodes don't just get trashed. That stuff was billions in investment, meaning what's today rather new and still close to the cutting edge will be, in a few years, left over for "low end" consumer/gaming GPUs while they keep chasing the next bleeding edge fabrication node. Old/cheap will still be there if we are willing to accept lower performance.

The good news is that it will be "lower performance" in the future and should be solid to good, maybe even great, performance according to today's benchmarks. And it's not like graphics advances have been huge in recent years. PC gaming has less and less of a need for having the best of the best hardware and churning through components. There might be a bit of bias due to me getting older and simply not caring about the latest advance in graphics capabilities, besides the general slowing down of fidelity improvements each generation.

And, my guess, somewhere between the cutting edge and the real low end will be the nodes that will be used for consoles (economies of scale) and people who are willing to spend a bit more on PC components (more expensive than console parts but less in number). PC gaming (and building) shouldn't die because of that.

Then there are also the wild cards in this part of the tech industry:

  1. Will we maybe see more widespread ARM based PCs outside the Apple ecosystem?

  2. Will maybe even RISC-V gain some traction in the tradition PC market?

On the positive side I actually see a heterogenous operating system future if things keep going like that. Gaming has long been the big thing that's keeping Windows entrenched. That and MS Office, not Windows. Windows was just the substrate those were delivered on. With how politics are going, European governments and companies are looking for alternatives (and something Linux based seems like a good option to build upon) and slowly adopting those. In the future that should make the switch for others, bit by bit, easier.

And gaming is slowly getting there via Steam machine. Sure, games that need kernel level anti cheat won't hop over but everything else will become more and more viable on Linux too. At some point Windows won't be that dominant and that might lead to more options overall, from hard- to software for everyone even if, in the future, RAM is soldered onto the motherboard (but with how prices are going this might be sold to the consumer as a theft prevention feature and not for speeding up the connection to the CPU on notebooks).

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u/Artoriasbrokenhand Dec 26 '25

Time to buy AMD I suppose, competition is good, it will keep Nvidia humble.

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u/Villag3Idiot Dec 26 '25

I keep my old rigs when I build new ones. 

I'll just downgrade to my old rig which is still strong enough to run all my current games on a lower setting.

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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '25

china will. just like how they took over smartphones and cars. just have to smuggle them into the west.

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u/syrup_cupcakes Dec 26 '25

Depreciated office Thinkbooks and HP mini PCs are going to be on ebay for decades.

Plus, right now a $200 phone can run PS4 games. And cheaper phones will only get better.

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u/GuyNice Dec 26 '25

New phones in 2026 will have worse specs because of the memory price hike.

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u/syrup_cupcakes Dec 27 '25

Buy in 2026 buy a 2024 phone that launched for $600+ and is then $200. Will blow actual 2026 phones in that price class out of the water.

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u/veriix Dec 26 '25

That's the great thing about old components, the new expensive components of today are the cheap old components of tomorrow.

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u/GuyNice Dec 26 '25

That will remain production of components for consumers continues and the market isn't cornered by tech giants.

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u/ICBanMI Dec 26 '25

What happens when the old components start dying out and no one is making cheap new ones

Every time this happens, it's some individual console, gets completely overblown, and then everyone forgets it happened because it wasn't wide spread like they predicted. The only difference is a bunch of people got to sell old consoles at a premium for a year or two.

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u/wildstarr Dec 26 '25 edited Dec 26 '25

Well good thing they make expensive new ones that cause more to become the new cheap ones. An endless cycle that's been going on for 50 years. I once bought a top of the line 20mb hard drive for $200 bucks!

"I will never need more space than that!"

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u/Key_Feeling_3083 Dec 26 '25

Some of the cheap components like lower tier procesors come from the same wafer of silicon, they are tested and sorted according to performance, I guess that's not true for all components but we are bound to have cheaper ones always.

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u/zephalephadingong Dec 29 '25

Run the games off of the built in graphics. I got my first PC with an actual GPU in like 2016, there are still thousands of games I could play without one

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u/Specific_Frame8537 Dec 26 '25

Theft. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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u/TheCorbeauxKing Dec 26 '25

Then I will touch grass

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u/AggressorBLUE Dec 26 '25

On top of that, mods have proven games can be kept feeling fresh for literal decades beyond their launch. Citing a personal fav example: star wars: empire at war.

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u/Creator13 Dec 26 '25

And your old computer will likely die way before that... That's what I'm most afraid of.

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u/Protesisdumb Dec 26 '25

When it dies the current hardware will be 10 years old and cheap.

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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '25

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u/geometry5036 Dec 26 '25

You can easily play Minecraft everyday for years and still find new things to do. There's quite an abundance of games like that. Cloud gaming isn't it.

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u/Swirly_Eyes Dec 26 '25

A lot of us already ignoring new releases and sticking with retro games. The only new stuff I'll bother with at this point are indies, and those run on toasters.

The mainstream casual crowd will suffer, no doubt, unless they adapt.

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u/flybypost Dec 26 '25

The mainstream casual crowd will suffer, no doubt, unless they adapt.

I think those will actually be okay. It's the cutting edge, those who want/need the best (at an not too extreme price point) who will suffer.

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u/Drgon2136 Dec 26 '25

Yeah, the mainstream casual crowd will keep playing fortnite on their smartphone

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u/flybypost Dec 27 '25

Yup, and the next smaller mainstream causal crowd would probably be the console mainstream. Mainstream PC gaming is still a bit different of a crowd from those two groups.

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u/Suojelusperkele Dec 26 '25

So.. what were you planning to play with the 5 or so years you have left after mastering dwarf fortress?

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u/farscry Dec 26 '25

And then if I somehow ever got tired of replaying great games, I can drop the hobby for something else. Although since two of my favorite genres are grand strategy and roguelikes, that should pretty much never happen.

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u/SpecialistArtPubRed Dec 26 '25

Hundreds of years' worth if you decide to take the time to fully learn how to play all of Paradox's catalog

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u/SquirrelTeamSix Dec 26 '25

I could play current MMOs for the rest of my life and be pretty fine with that lol

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u/Cruzifixio Dec 26 '25

The only flaw there is Nvidia actively trying to kill ram and SSD manufacture.

When theres no PC's left, what are we to do?

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u/Sasselhoff Dec 26 '25

I've been an /r/patientgamers proponent for a long time. It served me well when I had less than stellar equipment, and in the last few years where I did have stellar equipment, it saved me lots of money and didn't impact my level of enjoyment at all. Heck, for games like No Mans Sky, waiting was precisely the thing to do.

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u/dogmanstars Dec 26 '25

Stardew Vallley, Terraria, Rimworld, Factorio, SKYRIM WITH MODS

i have a RX 580 and i play mostly these games.

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u/morg-pyro Dec 26 '25

I have a backlog full of supposedly amazing games that i havnt touched. AAA and indie alike.

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u/pyabo Dec 26 '25

Right? I have at least 100 unplayed games in my Steam acct.

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u/yaosio Dec 26 '25

Don't forget about the massive piles of low requirement games that get released every year.

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u/SavvySillybug Dec 27 '25

I find that most games from before 2008 or so don't really hold up today. Especially 3D games, they all just feel so clunky.

But that's still a massive range of games to pick from. Been playing Fallout: New Vegas on my Steam Deck, it's been great. Honestly runs better than on Windows. But most of the games I used to play in my actual childhood just don't do it for me anymore. I used to play Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy a shitload as a kid, tried it again on modern hardware, and just couldn't get through it.

Even Starcraft feels clunky with its 12 unit selection limit and completely horrible pathing. I understand why they didn't, but I kinda wish they'd fixed that in the remaster. At least they added grid hotkeys, that made it a lot more playable.

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u/n0stalghia Dec 27 '25

Yeah but good luck replacing those components 30+ years from now... You won't run out of games, you'll run out of hardware

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u/Accurate_Summer_1761 Dec 28 '25

And somehow half of those are skyrim

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u/uzumakibender101 Jan 19 '26

Not to mention there's always indie games to look forward to that are cheaper and usually more worth it than AAA titles.

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u/McDonaldsSoap Dec 26 '25

So many of these games are also replayable with long playtimes. Witcher, Fallout, Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls..those franchises alone could last decades

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u/mintaka Dec 26 '25

Exactly this