After four months in closed beta, Fortnite is now available to stream via Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service. It means iOS users have another workaround to play one of the most popular games in the world after it was unceremoniously booted from the App Store in August 2020 for bypassing Apple’s in-app payment system.
The official launch follows a months-long beta period during which Nvidia says 500,000 people streamed over 4 million sessions of Fortnite via the service. As a result of the testing, Nvidia claims it’s been able to optimize its “on-screen touch controls and game menus.” Hopefully the changes address a control scheme that my colleague Jay Peters called “finicky” back in January.
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While iOS users have the most to gain from Fortnite coming to GeForce Now, the game is available to stream anywhere Nvidia’s cloud gaming service is available. As of this writing, the service is available via native apps on Windows, macOS, Android, Android TV, select LG TVs, and via browsers including Chrome and Edge. That said, Fortnite is available on most of this hardware already, so it might be easier to play the free-to-play game natively in many cases.
Fortnite on GeForce Now has been a long time coming with Epic and Nvidia announcing their intention to bring the game to the service in November 2020. Since then, the game has actually made it to release on Microsoft’s competing Xbox Cloud Gaming service, where it launched earlier this month. Like GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming is only available on iOS via web browsers because of Apple’s restrictions around game streaming services.
As part of today’s announcement, Nvidia says it’s offering any beta testers three free days of Priority membership to GeForce Now, its middle tier that normally costs $8.99 a month. It can be redeemed via redeem.nvidia.com, but you’ll need to be subscribed to the service’s most expensive $19.99 / month RTX 3080 tier to stream Fortnite at 120fps on compatible Android devices.
Nvidia boasts that its cloud gaming service now includes a library of 1,300 games that are available via a combination of Steam and the Epic Games Store.
wazup.