Over the last couple of months the internet has been abuzz with NVIDIA’s GeForce Partner Programme. Essentially, the GPP revolved around the fact that NVIDIA would be spending more on OEMs that would align themselves with NVIDIA exclusive branding guidelines.
While there are some positives that such a programme would yield, such as a greater budget for card partners to churn out better hardware for us, the consumers, the overall impact of the announcement of this programme was overwhelmingly negative and seen as “anti-competitive”. Now, I am no legal expert, and I firmly believe that NVIDIA’s legal team would have gone over this programme prior to its announcement with a fine-tooth comb.
So, I don’t think that the GPP was anti-competitive, rather a move that would cause its competitors to lose market share. Currently, NVIDIA dominates the upper echelon of the GPU market with their GTX 1080ti and Titan Xp. The GPP would have forced partners to align their gaming brands exclusively with NVIDIA, forcing the competition, namely AMD and Intel, to help create new sub brands for their products, which is why it has drawn a lot of flack from the gaming and tech community, causing NVIDIA to reevaluate their strategy. As of May 4, the NVIDIA GPP has ceased to be.
It’s both a good and a bad thing. While it’s common practice for companies to spend more for their top consumers, if it results in a loss of market share for the competitors, it means that such a move would draw a lot of negative publicity towards the company, causing more harm than good. The thing is that it’s easy for people like me to sit back and gauge the fallout of such a move. However, I do feel that NVIDIA could have done a much better job of the messaging it had behind the GPP so that it may have gone down better with the community. Well, now we’ll never know what could have been. I just hope that the gaming community can move forward and the prices of the GPUs come down, as right now, it costs too much to even fathom stepping into PC gaming.
