• There has been some slight movement on public facing channels for the local launch of GeForce Now through rain.
• The official GeForce Now website now clearly states rain is a GeForce NOW Alliance Partner.
• rain’s website where local gamers could register their interest has also been replaced with a login screen for rain customers.

Speaking frankly for a moment, cloud gaming has always felt like a bit of a stretch in South Africa. While cloud gaming means you could play Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty on a potato, the connectivity requirements for something like GeForce Now are demanding.

While the minimum requirement of at least 15Mbps for 720p gaming at 60fps is a bit more commonplace one still needs a latency of less than 80ms and for that, well, we need infrastructure in SA. To that end, rain announced at the tail end of 2022 that it was preparing to become a GeForce Now partner.

Since then, however, things have been moving as slowly as a frozen river thaws in Winter. The last we heard from rain was that it was still testing GeForce Now internally in a BETA phase. The firm noted it hoped to expand this program to select customers in the near future but there haven’t been any updates to that as yet.

This morning however, we were surprised to see that the GeForce Now South Africa page had been updated. Rather than sending us to an error page, we are now directed to a message stating that rain is an official GeForce NOW Alliance Partner.

What’s more is that the link that once directed users to add their email to receive updates on the rain website is now gone. That link now directs to the rain customer login page. Unfortunately, Hypertext doesn’t have a rain account so this is as far as we could get.

This could be nothing, but having visited the GeForce Now website daily, the fact that we aren’t seeing an error message anymore leads us to think that this service is taking shape quickly.

We’ve asked rain to provide us with an update, but by the time of publication, the company hadn’t responded. We will publish any updates at the top of this story so be sure to check back.

We also recommend bookmarking the GeForce Now website and checking it regularly.

There are still many questions surrounding this service chief among which is how much it will cost and what tiers will be available to locals. The ISP did say that local gamers wouldn’t need to be a rain customer to get access to GeForce Now last year, we’re hoping that hasn’t changed.