Well, at least some Shield TV owners aren’t happy
There are way too many ways to play video games these days. It’s a shame about being able to play them however you’d like, though, especially when you’re dealing with different hardware platforms tied to different screens. There are ways to fill those gap, though; one of them being Nvidia’s Shield TV, which lets users stream PC games to their living room sets. The company has announced, however, that it is bowing out of providing that crucial connection next year.
Shield owners were notified this week that Nvidia will shut down its GameStream service sometime in February. A software update will disable the feature.
GameStream works with PCs which have a GeForce GTX card or better, feeding whatever titles the GPU can optimize to receiving Shield TVs at up to 4K in HDR and 60fps.
The company is promoting Valve’s Steam Link as the direct alternative to use — though, with the fragmentation of distribution portals, local streaming access to games from 2K, Epic, and such gets a bit trickier if not impossible. Nvidia also offers server-based game streaming and a library of games through GeForce Now, but all sessions are time-limited and it costs $20 per month to get 4K streaming.
Any way you cut this cake, it’s still a big fat bummer that GameStream is coming offline because, for some people, it was their best choice out of a ton of mediocre options when it came to how they played the games they paid good money for.
