Nvidia is doubling the price of GeForce Now's paid subscription for new members

Nvidia is doubling the price of its GeForce Now cloud streaming service for new members.

The company had initially offered a $4.99 per month 'Founders' membership to those who subscribed during GeForce Now's debut year, but moving forward will instead be offering 'Priority' memberships for $9.99 per month.

An annual membership option is also available for $99.99 per year, and Nvidia has pledged to honor its founders with the 'Founder for Life' benefit, which will secure their $4.99 introductory rate as long as their account remains in good standing.

The pricing change arrives as GeForce Now enters its second year, having amassed close to 10 million members over the past 12 months.

Nvidia intends to continue improving the service over the coming months by supporting day-and-date launches, increasing its game library (which currently includes over 800 titles), opening new data centers, and improving its quality-of-service with more optimizations. 

Omdia senior analyst George Jijiashvili said the price hike "makes more business sense for a service with notoriously high running costs," but suggested GeForce Now is also a means to other ends for Nvidia.

"I believe Nvidia’s ambitions for GeForce Now go beyond the revenue generated from subscriptions," continued Jijiashvili. "GeForce Now enables Nvidia to flex its cloud server muscles and forge mutually beneficial partnerships with telcos around the world. 

"It demonstrates its GPU capabilities to a much wider audience and builds long-lasting relationship with gamers, who Nvidia hopes would be more inclined to favor purchasing Nvidia’s products in the future. 

"Its freemium model also creates a lot of goodwill and I expect other cloud gaming services to take note. Nvidia’s ongoing investments in GeForce Now are solidifying its position in the cloud gaming market – a market which Omdia believes will play a key role in the future of video games."

Gamasutra and Omdia are sibling organizations under Informa Tech