Content sector served by transmission (streaming) has long pushed users to subscribe to more expensive plans by introducing advertising in the cheapest plan. After platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, it’s now a service GeForce NOW, which will start including advertising in the free plan starting March 5.

The free GeForce NOW plan offers basic support with standard server access, but at the cost of only allowing one hour-long session per day. Despite the limitation, it is no less true that the free plan does not generate income for NVIDIA, so the green giant decided to introduce advertising in order to make some money and improve its sustainability.

As for how advertising works in the free GeForce NOW plan, it doesn’t appear to be game-breaking at first, as NVIDIA explained that “Members will experience up to two minutes of sponsor video messages before each free queue play session. “We anticipate that this change will reduce average wait times for free users over time.” In other words, and in case it wasn’t clear: the ad appears before you log into the game and not during the game.

NVIDIA also explains that introducing advertising to the GeForce NOW free plan will help “provide ongoing support for the free service,” which is a fancy way of saying that the purpose is to generate revenue that plans some economic viability. Obviously, advertising will not be in the Priority and Ultimate plans.

Plan Preferably, in exchange for 10.99 euros per month or 54.99 euros per semesterprovides a premium version of the platform with ray tracing support, priority access to premium servers, gaming sessions of up to six hours, up to 1080p resolution and up to 60 frames per second when gaming, while the plan Ultimate, which costs 21.99 euros per month or 109 euros per semesterprovides access to the GeForce RTX 4080 platform, exclusive access to RTX 4080 servers, gaming sessions of up to eight hours, resolutions up to 4K and up to 120 frames per second.

Despite being about video games instead of videos, NVIDIA joins the trend of advertising the cheapest plan of a service that provides content through streaming, although it has in its favor the fact that it is free, while Prime Video and Netflix require the payment of a monthly fee.