GeForce NOW membership doubles in price, Founders grandfathered into starting cost

Since its launch, GeForce NOW has offered two tiers of membership. The first one was completely free and kept players waiting exorbitant amounts of time to get into a game session, limited the quality of their stream, and capped off session length at one hour at a time. The second was called Founders and cost $4.99 per month and provided unlimited play session length, full graphical fidelity including RTX, and immediate access to games with zero wait times.

After a year of service, the Founder’s membership is now being retired – well, sort of. It’s officially being replaced by a ‘Priority’ tier, which will cost $9.99 per month – that’s double the cost – and offers the same benefits as before. It’s still a fantastic value and is more in line with what we see from similar services, including Google Stadia Pro. The Founder’s tier was never a guaranteed thing forever and had an ‘introductory’ pricing clearly stamped on it all along.

I can hear all of you Founders kicking up a storm already, but let me give you some good news – anyone who still pays for a Founder’s membership will remain locked into that $4.99 per month payment plan so long as their account is active. If you cancel, even once, and then set up a subscription to GeForce NOW again, you’ll automatically be placed into the Priority pricing structure. This makes sense, seems fair, and I take no issue with it, personally.

You should also know that there’s a new annual membership payment option for the new Priority tier as well, which allows you to spend $99.99 once per year and get all of the same benefits. This equals a total savings of about twenty bucks over the 12 months, so it’s up to you if you want to schedule that out on your calendar and take a larger hit as opposed to having yet another monthly subscription. It doesn’t really matter much either way, depending on who you ask, but options are always great, right?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I believe that no service can truly remain operational for years at a $5 membership cost, and it was bound to double up before long. Even if we weren’t foretold in the marketing materials, I would have predicted this. I would only be concerned if a game streaming platform raised their prices above the $10 mark since they are non-essential subscriptions. Are you still an NVidia GeForce NOW Founder, or have you already canceled your subscription? I am, but I hardly play it compared to Stadia thanks to its lack of quality on my home connection – Stadia seems to handle slower speeds better and produce better results, but I’ve heard others say just the opposite.