GPU vendors (called partners now?) have been bundling games with cards since early 2000 (maybe pre 2000, but Im too lazy to look for examples now). Here is Palit Radeon X700 packaged with two 2 year old games: Xpand Rally (legit good game) and Second Sight (never even heard of it before writing this post, but actually looks good!) http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/video/palit-2.html
When it comes to GPU manufacturers Afaik AMD started first in 2012 with "Never Settle" Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs. Nivida followed a year later with "Gear Up" garbage promotion of free items for free to play Planetside 2, World of Tanks and Hawken.
When it comes to bang for buck giving out free games is fools game, real money is in paying brib^^^ organizing cross promotion and developer support for game studios. Nvidia started with "The Way It’s Meant To Be Played" program sponsoring Ubisoft
"Number one: Nvidia Gameworks typically damages the performance on Nvidia hardware as well, which is a bit tragic really. It certainly feels like it’s about reducing the performance, even on high-end graphics cards, so that people have to buy something new.
"That’s the consequence of it, whether it’s intended or not - and I guess I can’t read anyone’s minds so I can’t tell you what their intention is. But the consequence of it is it brings PCs to their knees when it’s unnecessary. And if you look at Crysis 2 in particular, you see that they’re tessellating water that’s not visible to millions of triangles every frame, and they’re tessellating blocks of concrete – essentially large rectangular objects – and generating millions of triangles per frame which are useless."
Why give out free games when you can influence developers to include your closed source garbage tech (physX, running in FPU mode on SSE capable CPUs to make it a slow path without nvidia GPU), dial useless feature to 11 (tessellation), or incorporate something taking 50% performance hit for marginal visual gain (ray tracing) forcing users into frequent upgrades!
They werent even the first to do it. Intel pioneered this practice in their golden age of anticompetitive bribe binge starting in 1998 by sponsoring Ubisoft to print huge "Designed for Intel MMX" commercial on all POD boxes https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/51358-pod-windows-... despite MMX not influencing game speed at all (used for one sound effect). Amazingly someone working in Intel "developer relations group" at the time is on HN and chimed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237085
"I can tell you that Intel gave companies $1 million for "Optimized" games for marketing such."
$1 million for one optional MMX optimized sound effect.
Bundling though doesn't cause people to decide after a couple hours of gameplay that they want to continue playing but with smoother/higher res/etc graphics.
Which is what drove my upgrades, I liked the games in question, and saw how they ran on other peoples hardware enough to want that experience for myself.
(although in the case of the 1080 I also had a monitor setup that didn't work well with the graphics card I was using at the time, so it was that as much as witcher which drove the upgrade).
Instead of bundling, the game companies would be better served by picking some gotta-have-it title and giving the first couple levels away as a trial/etc, and making sure that there was big jump in perf moving to the latest card and then bundling the license with the card. That way people were hooked and willing to pay for the experience. I generally avoid bundled card deals because the games don't interest me.
When it comes to GPU manufacturers Afaik AMD started first in 2012 with "Never Settle" Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs. Nivida followed a year later with "Gear Up" garbage promotion of free items for free to play Planetside 2, World of Tanks and Hawken.
When it comes to bang for buck giving out free games is fools game, real money is in paying brib^^^ organizing cross promotion and developer support for game studios. Nvidia started with "The Way It’s Meant To Be Played" program sponsoring Ubisoft
https://techreport.com/news/14707/ubisoft-comments-on-assass...
this bought them power to retract game studios DirectX 10.1 patch which inconveniently gave AMD fps advantage.
Nvidia doubled down with a new program ironically called GameWorks:
https://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-to...
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-game...
https://wccftech.com/fight-nvidias-gameworks-continues-amd-c...
"Number one: Nvidia Gameworks typically damages the performance on Nvidia hardware as well, which is a bit tragic really. It certainly feels like it’s about reducing the performance, even on high-end graphics cards, so that people have to buy something new.
"That’s the consequence of it, whether it’s intended or not - and I guess I can’t read anyone’s minds so I can’t tell you what their intention is. But the consequence of it is it brings PCs to their knees when it’s unnecessary. And if you look at Crysis 2 in particular, you see that they’re tessellating water that’s not visible to millions of triangles every frame, and they’re tessellating blocks of concrete – essentially large rectangular objects – and generating millions of triangles per frame which are useless."
Why give out free games when you can influence developers to include your closed source garbage tech (physX, running in FPU mode on SSE capable CPUs to make it a slow path without nvidia GPU), dial useless feature to 11 (tessellation), or incorporate something taking 50% performance hit for marginal visual gain (ray tracing) forcing users into frequent upgrades!
They werent even the first to do it. Intel pioneered this practice in their golden age of anticompetitive bribe binge starting in 1998 by sponsoring Ubisoft to print huge "Designed for Intel MMX" commercial on all POD boxes https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/51358-pod-windows-... despite MMX not influencing game speed at all (used for one sound effect). Amazingly someone working in Intel "developer relations group" at the time is on HN and chimed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237085
"I can tell you that Intel gave companies $1 million for "Optimized" games for marketing such."
$1 million for one optional MMX optimized sound effect.