After GeForce Now launched with free and paid cloud gaming tiers, Google Stadia will debut its own free tier "over the next few months".

Google VP and Stadia product manager Phil Harrison says that the cloud gaming service will introduce a free tier in the near future.

"Over the next few months you will be able to experience Stadia for free," Harrison told Protocol in a Feb 5 article.

"No money down, without having to put a box in your home, you can just click and play amazing games straight from our data centre."

The timing is significant, with this tidbit arriving as hardware company Nvidia launched its own cloud gaming service.

Nvidia took GeForce Now out of a five-year beta this week, allowing members to play their PC games over the net.

There, a free tier requires players to join a queue and allows them to play for an hour before the queue system kicks in again; the Founders Tier offers top-of-the-range graphical performance, priority queuing, six-hour sessions and a three-month trial, for a promotional price of US$4.99 per month.

That's compared with Google Stadia's current US$129 Founder's Edition, three-month trial, and US$9.99 monthly sub; while some games are complimentary, the rest must be bought through Stadia rather than brought over from existing partner stores.

In the same article, Microsoft's Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, said that he regarded Google and Amazon as Xbox's competitors, rather than Nintendo or Sony.

"I don't want to be in a fight over format wars with [Sony and Nintendo] while Amazon and Google are focusing on how to get gaming to 7 billion people around the world. Ultimately, that's the goal."

The US-based Microsoft, Amazon and Google companies have their own expansive server architecture systems that can support online gaming and cloud gaming projects.

In May 2019, for example, Microsoft and Sony announced that the former's Azure technology would be used to fulfill the latter's cloud server needs. Sony had previously partnered with Amazon.

Then in December, Nvidia partnered with the gaming division of Chinese Internet giant Tencent to power Tencent's cloud gaming service, Start.

 - AFP Relaxnews