Nvidia’s GeForce Now is an easy and convenient way to play PC games if you don’t actually have a gaming PC, or you can’t fit a 30-pound desktop into your carry-on luggage. But at the moment you’re going to have a hard time getting into the service if you don’t already have a subscription. Most of the options for GFN are currently sold out due to high demand.
That’s according to a report from ComputerBase in Germany (via Tom’s Hardware), which shows new free accounts, day passes, and one-month passes as mostly unavailable. The site reports that one-month and six-month passes for Ultimate are still available, as well as six-month Performance passes. My existing free account seems to be functioning, but others at PCWorld are reporting that the option to create a new GeForce Now account is currently blocked out in at least some locations. Your experience might be different, as GeForce Now is highly variable based on location.
Though GeForce Now is extremely flexible in terms of load and users, it isn’t infinite. Each game session needs a dedicated Windows-based cloud machine to be spun up and active, with a real graphics card powering it. A statement from Nvidia support said that new accounts are being restricted to prevent overload, but a more detailed explanation wasn’t provided.
The reason for the current load isn’t clear. It would seem to me that if Nvidia were to get swamped by GFN users at any time, it would have been over the travel-heavy December holidays, when I used the service on my phone without issue. If I had to guess, I’d say that GeForce Now might be upgrading at least some of its data centers, as the new RTX 50-series GPUs are expected to hit retailers at the end of the month. For GFN users, those would almost certainly be reserved for the most expensive Ultimate tier.
Though to be clear, that’s entirely speculative on my part. We’ll be keeping an eye on the situation.