04-18-2018, 10:16 PM
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/26773...er-program
Quote:HardOCP openly admits that AMD brought them this story in the first place, but just because a company alerts you to a story doesn’t mean the story isn’t true. A month ago, HardOCP alleged that Nvidia had kicked off a marketing campaign that required AIB’s to push AMD GPUs out of their premium brands in order to receive various benefits, including marketing dollars and GPU allocation. Today, we see evidence that more than one company has either launched a new AMD-specific brand (Asus), removed AMD from its top-brand gaming products (Asus, MSI), or is choosing to sell an identical product without its top-end branding, where the only difference is the presence of an AMD GPU as opposed to an Nvidia card (Gigabyte).
This evidence doesn’t automatically confirm HardOCP’s story is accurate, but it suggests that such strategic “realignments” are indeed taking place across multiple companies at more or less the same time. Given that companies don’t normally launch all-new brands with no reason given, and the fact that nobody seems to want to talk about the GPP in the first place, the evidence thus far supports HardOCP’s story, at least in broad strokes. And while some customers will scoff that this represents a meaningful restriction, this represents an area of disconnect between how companies think about branding and how consumers tend to think about it. Smart companies take brands very seriously. By conspicuously linking the top gaming brands from various AIBs to Nvidia and Nvidia alone, Team Green would win a major marketing coup — not by literally telling AIBs they can’t sell AMD GPUs, but by ensuring that the top marketing spots from a given partner company always held by GeForce.