South Africa’s first cloud game streaming service on a roll

Nvidia’s GeForce Now users in South Africa have racked up over six million minutes on the cloud game streaming service since it launched locally in December 2023.

That is feedback from Nvidia’s official local partner for GeForce Now — mobile network operator Rain.

GeForce Now allows gamers without the necessary hardware to stream and play over a thousand titles via the Internet to a range of devices including regular desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones.

The service uses dedicated gaming servers equipped with powerful processors and graphics cards instead of native hardware. That makes using very basic devices with minimal computing power possible.

GeForce Now is the only cloud game streaming service with full local support. For a cloud game streaming service to work properly, it needs low latency to ensure that user inputs are responsive enough for a playable experience.

To roll out local server infrastructure, Nvidia partnered with Rain, which also handles subscription payments to the service in South Africa.

Rain told MyBroadband that the service continued to prove extremely popular, with over six million minutes of play time across its servers since going live in early December 2023.

Rain shared an interesting trend: the most popular games were multiplayer titles that were not necessarily performance-intensive.

“Popular titles such as Fortnite, Call of Duty Modern Warfare II, Destiny 2, Apex Legends and Genshin Impact, regularly feature in the top five most played games,” Rain said.

When asked whether the demand had necessitated rolling out further servers, Rain said it “certainly” remained committed to expanding the GeForce Now service, without providing further details.

MyBroadband has visited the GeForce Now sign-up page on Rain’s website on several occasions in the past few months, and subscriptions have always been sold out.

Those interested in signing up can join a waitlist, and Rain will contact them whenever capacity opens up.

The table below summarises the differences between the GeForce Now Priority and Ultra plans available in South Africa.

MyBroadband recently noticed an issue among GeForce Now users who had to queue for several hours before getting into a game.

GeForce Now users have a limited session length of either three or eight hours, after which they need to enter a queue of players waiting for a system to become available. That ensures that all subscribers get a fair chance to play some games.

However, Rain said the extended queuing was not due to a flood of players but rather a cluster incident on the servers.

“The issue caused sessions to not be allocated to available GPUs. The issue has been resolved,” Rain said.

The good news is that Nvidia’s contracts with partners mandate that they have minimal queuing times between sessions.

That could explain why Rain has been enforcing strict limits on the number of sign-ups to the service.

Estimating subscriber numbers

Although Rain has not shared the number of people subscribed to GeForce Now, it can be estimated based on the number of minutes played.

GeForce Now went live in South Africa on 8 December 2023 following a limited beta over several months.

The service was available for 206 days before it reached 6 million minutes — or 100,000 hours — of playtime by Monday, 1 July 2024.

That works out to about 29,126 minutes of playtime — or 485 hours — per day.

To clock that amount of playtime, 20 players would have to consistently remained on GeForce Now for all seven months.

In the much more likely scenario, the average number of daily hours played by each user over the period of availability was four hours, and there were roughly 121 users on the service.

If a more moderate 30 minutes of average playtime was recorded on each day, the users on the service were near a 1,000.

The table below shows estimates for how many GeForce Now subscribers there are in South Africa based on the total playing time over the past seven months.