It’s no surprise once again that Nvidia, makers of some of the finest technology humanity has come to invent is yet again finding itself in more hot water because they just can’t get enough press apparently. It’s not enough being the top seller of graphics cards, it’s not enough having the highest market share. Oh no, Nvidia has to go after their own partners for not allowing them to have a monopoly on what seems like branding.
Branding
Yes, branding that thing that comes on the side of your graphics card. The bit that says ROG, Gaming or SuperMegaCard.exe, the thing these partners (Asus, MSI, EVGA, etc) pour millions into, to set them out from the rest. Nvidia wants to take that brand and “Seize the means of production” on it. Basically, and this is what GPP states, you can’t use that brand with an AMD card for example. So before you’d have the ROG RX 580 with all the flashy lighting. No more! Nvidia said all that effort you put in marketing two cards, now you can put it all into one! The competitor? Nah they don’t matter, they don’t have as much volume as us. It’s absolutely absurd to me that Nvidia is flexing to get brands to pull their marketing for a competitor. Surely that has to ring some alarm bells somewhere in the world?
Community
The community reaction has been nothing but well mediocre to say the least. You’ve got a private company making a massive move against the industry here and the most everyone is bothering about is whether the prices are going to come down so they can keep buying their products. There’s a simple solution to this. Boycott Nvidia and stop supporting these practices.
Is it really a big deal if you can’t play the latest and greatest title on ultra at 87 fps when the AMD Card will do it at like 79? Is it really that big of a deal? I get that you want every bit of performance for your dollar but, sometimes you have to look at the industry and say… yes. I’m taking a stand, enough is enough. Otherwise you’re saying I have no problem with a monopoly, everything costing more and my general ability as a consumer to choose being lost. I’ve always had the comeback to this being, “But what if I want to choose a NVidia GPU, you saying all of this is stopping my choice from going through”. I’m not trying to stop you buying a NVidia GPU. I just want you to be informed enough to be okay with what is being proposed. It’s healthy to have a balance of two products battling against each other. No one loses if AMD leaves the market.
For too long gamers have just accepted whatever a company says to them as final:
Now, here’s the thing, some of the articles I’ve linked might actually contradict my point, in that they show people rising up and fighting back the system. But did they? The games still sold millions, they might have had a 20 odd reddit posts saying NEVER AGAIN, but do we need to reference that famous image for the 498th time on the internet?
At the end of the day I think it really shows the true nature of the gaming community. People just don’t care.
The Realization
People don’t care. That’s all it is. All people want is a video game, with a story, with some multiplayer if possible and a way to burn their cash. Let’s face it we aren’t buying houses any time soon. Basically every Ubisoft game at this point is predictable with the same DLC, the same open world, combat systems, physics, laughable bugs. GTA Is clearly going to be going down the route of an online only adventure after it’s latest success with no doubt some of that transferring to Red Dead. We seen it with Call of Duty MW2. The hype machine that built around that game even though it was an impending doom waiting to secretly bring the studio to what it is today, an absolute mess. Trust me. You could tell it wasn’t the same people that made MW3.
But what does all this have to do with Nvidia’s GPP Program? Well it’s rather simple, it’s the same community. We are the people that accepted;
- Windows 10 doing all manners of bullshit to our systems, automatically enabling updates, changing preferences and rolling out a bombsite of an interface.
- Micro-transactions in the form of skins, guns, coins becoming the defacto way to wring more money out of customers, all of us that care about how we look? Jog on mate.
- The consolification of Battlefield, trust me I’ve got a post dedicated to that game coming.
- Steam being accepted as the global monopoly on buying PC Games (While I do accept the competitors are a tad troublesome, at least make the effort to shop around! GoG is quite fantastic).
Trust me, I could go on for several more bullet points but forgive me if my faith in this community hasn’t been shattered by the willingness to bend over to companies.
But, they care about us!
Companies, the one thing that gets into the minds of us all is the advertising and targeting that companies do to make you their friend. I’ve done it myself, I’ve seen myself defending absolutely stupid things Microsoft does and wondering why the fuck am I even bothering, I agree with the person I’m arguing with!
I’ve seen people argue with me about actually wanting micro-transactions because they don’t have time to play the game! Well don’t bloody play it then, throwing money at your problems is a downright bad and stupid trait to have! Again, I should know, I’ve been there myself! You might remember the controversy with one Star Wars Battlefront 2, why it got so god damn heated that people that wanted to actually play the game, not join in the community boycott actually broke away from the official subreddit so they could have a place to circlejerk about how fantastic the game was. You had people that seemed… scared to come out and talk badly about the game because at least it looked like they didn’t want to admit it had faults.
It’s absolute bliss ignorance. If you can ignore all the issues, pretend they don’t exist, pretend the company behind the game wasn’t voted one of the worst companies in America, pretend that they never had one of the most down-voted comments in existence on Reddit, pretend that the entire gaming community isn’t going for the throat for everyone playing the game. Then fuck me you should get a job as a brick wall.
And that is where it comes back to our full circle. Back to NVidia’s GPP. You see it isn’t all that different. People are ignoring issues for a few more FPS. When all they really have to do is support the competition for a few generations and watch their products improve just as NVidas has. Money talks at the end of the day, if they don’t have the money then don’t be surprised when you don’t have a choice.
Conclusion
Gamers in general want no drama. They want to sit down, play their games and not have to deal with any issues in that game or surrounding it. The thing is that isn’t possible in today’s world. You have a moral choice to pick, a choice to pick for the industry and about 1,400 bloggers just like me telling you why you should be shot out of a canon for X, Y and Z reason. We wouldn’t have to have these conversions if people simply put stop defending multi-billion dollar companies, and stopped acting like their life will end if they don’t have the latest star wars game or the latest Call of Duty and instead just waited. Wait, see if the games good, gauge community reaction, is the bug list currently standing worth the buy? Are you happy with a £54.99 price tag for games? Are you happy with the publisher? It’s a lot to decide on, and there’s plenty more to decide on after all of this. The real question is, do you want to? Do you care if Nvidia was the only GPU maker, do you care if Ubisoft made the same game every single year? Do you care if Microsoft was the only operating system developer left, what about Rockstar and it’s love for GTA Online? Would you prefer it to go back to the single player roots?
Everyone has a voice. You have a voice. A company shouldn’t decide that and I shouldn’t either. All I can hope is that this somewhat made you think about what you want in the future. I’m not telling you to go out and buy all of AMDs stock. I’m saying, think about it.
Also, to ya’ll saying that voting with your wallet doesn’t work, just stop please.
