Nvidia and Xbox have turned Steam Deck into a Game Pass beast

I’ve spoken about GeForce Now before. It’s brilliant. Beyond platitudes, even. So good I wonder why more people aren’t talking about it. Nvidia’s cloud gaming platform – which, at its premium ‘Ultimate’ level gets you 4K ray-traced gaming on a high-end PC beamed flawlessly to your home – answers the question of whether cloud gaming can be the future. It can... at least for some people. I’ve got a very beefy Full Fibre internet setup, which helps, and I’ve been taking advantage of GeForce Now’s recent addition of Game Pass titles. Let’s just say that my Steam Deck has never felt more incredible.

Rewinding a bit, first. Xbox has offered cloud gaming for a very large portion of its Game Pass catalogue for several years now. What was previously known as xCloud lowkey became Xbox Cloud Gaming (beta, still), and it works, but isn’t brilliant. In fact, it’ll soon be the worst of the major players in terms of quality, despite building on top of the best subscription service. You can use this on Steam Deck, iPads, phones... almost any device if it has support for an internet browser.

I used it a fair bit, but I always felt a bit dirty doing so, like I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a relic gaming PC packing a Voodoo 2 GPU. I could feel developers crying as I fought against lag and image breakup in order to rack up some Achievements. GeForce Now has none of those problems. Apart from the odd wifi stutter, it creates the illusion that I’ve managed to get my hands on the world’s most overpowered handheld.

A cruel twist of the Steam Deck is that it doesn’t support Game Pass ‘natively’; you can install Windows and set up dual booting to access the service, but that’s a faff, and I have enough of that in my life. So I settled for Xbox Cloud Gaming, that is until I played Game Pass titles on GeForce Now. I’m sure “It just works” is someone’s slogan, probably trademarked (please don’t sue), but it’s true. There’s a minor inconvenience setting a web browser to launch as if it’s a game, and you need to log in to your Xbox account every time you play, but it’s worth it for the latest Game Pass titles running as if they are on a PC that costs way over $1500, held in your hand.

GeForce Now doesn’t get every Game Pass addition day and date with their arrival on the original services, but it gets some and others are being added all the time. I’ve been playing Starfield, Forza Motorsport, Deathloop, Doom Eternal, and Warhammer 40,000: Darktide at settings beyond what my Xbox Series X can deliver... and I once again need to hammer this point home... in my hands. The Steam Deck felt a big magical playing games installed to the device, but show someone this setup and they might mistake you for a practitioner of the dark arts.

You might be thinking to yourself that all this technology from the future can’t be cheap, and you’re mostly right. If you don’t already sub to Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass, you’ll need to start. On top of that, that top tier whizbang GeForce Now membership costs $99.99 for six months. Overall you’re up to ballpark $300 a year. Of course, you’re not limited to Game Pass titles. Geforce Now offers loads of games across Steam, Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Connect, and more (although it’s missing some big ones, to be completely honest).

While I’m once again talking about Steam Deck, Game Pass on GeForce Now is also reportedly great on the ROG Ally and the Logitech G Cloud. I’m a convert, as you can hopefully tell, as it’s given me almost everything I want from cloud gaming.

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