Now you can stream Lara Croft from the cloud, with a Nvidia Shield

“Square Enix is delighted to join the Nvidia Shield platform and enable instant access for gamers to stream our award-winning franchises like Tomb Raider with GeForce NOW,” said Janet Swallow, VP of worldwide licensing of the Eidos label at Square Enix, on the Nvidia blog.

The games are expected to show up on the Shield for streaming throughout the rest of this year, with more launches planned in the future if all goes well. Together they add to the growing catalog of games on the platform, which includes Submerged, Grim Fandango, and Massive Chalice.

Geforce NOW is the service that Nvidia is hoping to encourage people to get on board with though. Offering over 80 games to play, streamed straight from the cloud, the games are available for just $8 per month, which considering you can pick up a Shield TV for under $50, represents a reasonably cheap way to get hold of a sizeable gaming library.

Of course there are all the additional media functions like Netflix and BBC iPlayer access too, but just about every console, set-top box, and smart TV comes with that built in functionality now, making Nvidia’s plans a little less certain.

That goes doubly so considering all of the stick PCs and Intel NUCs that have released over the past year. Although the latter of those is much more expensive in almost all guises, the living room computing and gaming platform is no longer console dominated — there’s a whole new generation of hardware to contend with.

What’s your go to media viewing and gaming system for the living room? We’re quite partial to the Wii U ourselves.