No info either way yet, but if I had to guess, my guess would be it will be released on GeForce Now, later than February 11th. Potentially a long time later.
Since this post, we've also seen Firaxis add Civ VI to Netflix (which many of us didn't even know had games). My guess is it's an intentional strategy to get as many people as possible playing Civ, especially those who are new to the game, several months ahead of VII's launch, to maximize the potential audience who would buy Civ VII during the first month. Every person who tries VI (or V or IV) this autumn because it's on GeForce Now, and who wouldn't have tried it otherwise, is a potential Civ VII customer. It's a smart strategy really.
But if they include VII on GeForce Now, or Netflix, etc. at launch, they remove the incentive to buy it at full price, which is their most profitable way of selling the game.
Additionally, VII is very unlikely to have high minimum hardware requirements, IMO - it's not going to be the equivalent of Crysis in 2007 where launching on GeForce Now (had it existed then) would have made quite a bit of sense. I've been playing Civ VI on the desktop I built in 2011 over the past week or two, with its midrange 2016 graphics card, original CPU, and Civ VI stored on a traditional hard drive, and it plays just fine on Ultra settings (at 1920x1200) and Large maps, with reasonable loading times. The only thing that isn't buttery-smooth is leader animations, and they're still 30 FPS. Firaxis knows how to strike a balance looking good and running for a very large part of the potential audience, so there is unlikely to be a requirements-related reason to need to launch on GeForce Now.
I could be proven wrong, but given the number of premium options for purchasing VII at launch, I'd be quite surprised if Firaxis/2K passed up potentially significant profits by including GeForce Now at or near launch.
