D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
I don't think most people realize how aggressive are the levels of narrative control, disdain and sheer lack of respect that is being displayed by nvidia in this situation. Towards both their GPU reviewers (which are their de facto marketing partners that come pretty cheap in outlets like HUB) and of course to their customers.
The gravest fact here is there was no attempt to communicate with HUB and strike a conversation like mature grown-ups should do.
Had nvidia spoken to them prior to cutting them off though this e-mail, they would have known HUB was hours away from releasing a video exclusively dedicated to raytracing and DLSS, i.e. exactly what nvidia wanted them to do.
Here's the breakdown of what's really happening:
1 - Nvidia knows damn well this would come out to the public and become international news among media outlets for enthusiast hardware consumers. Every youtube/website that reviews hardware is talking about this. They want to send this message to all media outlets with no exception.
2 - Nvidia also knows that the first 24-48 hours after a GPU launch are when most consumers watch the video reviews / articles about the new cards, which to most outlets it corresponds to a substantial share of their revenue. At the same time, they always launch their own FE cards several days before the OEM third-party ones. In the current system of FE cards releasing days/weeks earlier, which Nvidia themselves created, not sending these cards to select media outlets means taking away a large share of their revenue and ability to compete for attention. It doesn't matter all that much that Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc. are still sending their cards to HUB. To HUB (and everyone else Nvidia does this to), this means a substantial cut in their revenue.
3 - Nvidia did not draw a line in the sand. There is no observable and fixed amount of coverage over their raytracing performance that will ensure that a media outlet isn't blacklisted. The purpose here is to instill fear into the media outlets. By not knowing how much coverage of raytracing/upscaling they need to do, the media outlets that are now being driven by fear will overcompensate on their coverage for raytracing performance and nvidia's exclusive upscalers.
4 - Blacklisting comes without prior warning nor negotiation. Which is another way to instill fear into the media outlets that require FE to thrive and survive. There are no warnings or second chances. They either behave exactly like nvidia wants them to from the start, or they get their revenue cut down.
So to summarize, the message that nvidia is sending is the following:
Dear reviewers,
From now on you will be testing our cards exactly like we want you to. You will put our products in a better light than our competitors. You will talk about our exclusive features and performance advantages in a way that pleases us. Fail to do this and we will sever your audience and revenue without warning.
How some are still lightly pushing this aside as nvidia "being dicks" is something that honestly baffles me.
Are we (most of us at least) not consumers here? Do we not all want better competition? How exactly does this help us, the market and tech development in general?
This is bad even for nvidia fanboys! Do they not want a fair assessment of how their nvidia graphics card actually behaves in the games they'll be playing?
Do we not all remember what happened when AMD wasn't able to compete in the x86 market, where Intel kept flooding the market with practically the same quad-cores for almost 8 years? All Intel did from 2011 onwards was stagnate their offerings, reducing the SoC's size through newer nodes to increase their margins by selling at the same or higher prices as their predecessors. That was terrible even for Intel fanboys!
Full e-mail sent to Hardware Unboxed below:
There are people here who literally used to flood the GPU subs with new threads consisting of official nvidia announcements and geforce driver updates, for maximum visibility. Eventually the mods caught wind of it and contained those into a single thread, which still gets professionally updated to this day.
You know, the same people that are now doing some whataboutisms over stuff that happened over 5 years ago (b-but look, AMD is bad too!).
The gravest fact here is there was no attempt to communicate with HUB and strike a conversation like mature grown-ups should do.
Had nvidia spoken to them prior to cutting them off though this e-mail, they would have known HUB was hours away from releasing a video exclusively dedicated to raytracing and DLSS, i.e. exactly what nvidia wanted them to do.
Here's the breakdown of what's really happening:
1 - Nvidia knows damn well this would come out to the public and become international news among media outlets for enthusiast hardware consumers. Every youtube/website that reviews hardware is talking about this. They want to send this message to all media outlets with no exception.
2 - Nvidia also knows that the first 24-48 hours after a GPU launch are when most consumers watch the video reviews / articles about the new cards, which to most outlets it corresponds to a substantial share of their revenue. At the same time, they always launch their own FE cards several days before the OEM third-party ones. In the current system of FE cards releasing days/weeks earlier, which Nvidia themselves created, not sending these cards to select media outlets means taking away a large share of their revenue and ability to compete for attention. It doesn't matter all that much that Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc. are still sending their cards to HUB. To HUB (and everyone else Nvidia does this to), this means a substantial cut in their revenue.
3 - Nvidia did not draw a line in the sand. There is no observable and fixed amount of coverage over their raytracing performance that will ensure that a media outlet isn't blacklisted. The purpose here is to instill fear into the media outlets. By not knowing how much coverage of raytracing/upscaling they need to do, the media outlets that are now being driven by fear will overcompensate on their coverage for raytracing performance and nvidia's exclusive upscalers.
4 - Blacklisting comes without prior warning nor negotiation. Which is another way to instill fear into the media outlets that require FE to thrive and survive. There are no warnings or second chances. They either behave exactly like nvidia wants them to from the start, or they get their revenue cut down.
So to summarize, the message that nvidia is sending is the following:
Dear reviewers,
From now on you will be testing our cards exactly like we want you to. You will put our products in a better light than our competitors. You will talk about our exclusive features and performance advantages in a way that pleases us. Fail to do this and we will sever your audience and revenue without warning.
How some are still lightly pushing this aside as nvidia "being dicks" is something that honestly baffles me.
Are we (most of us at least) not consumers here? Do we not all want better competition? How exactly does this help us, the market and tech development in general?
This is bad even for nvidia fanboys! Do they not want a fair assessment of how their nvidia graphics card actually behaves in the games they'll be playing?
Do we not all remember what happened when AMD wasn't able to compete in the x86 market, where Intel kept flooding the market with practically the same quad-cores for almost 8 years? All Intel did from 2011 onwards was stagnate their offerings, reducing the SoC's size through newer nodes to increase their margins by selling at the same or higher prices as their predecessors. That was terrible even for Intel fanboys!
Full e-mail sent to Hardware Unboxed below:
Remember some 10-15 years ago when it was uncovered that nvidia was hiring a marketing firm that consisted of putting forum users out there as posters for hire (literally professional shills)? What makes you think that ever stopped?
There are people here who literally used to flood the GPU subs with new threads consisting of official nvidia announcements and geforce driver updates, for maximum visibility. Eventually the mods caught wind of it and contained those into a single thread, which still gets professionally updated to this day.
You know, the same people that are now doing some whataboutisms over stuff that happened over 5 years ago (b-but look, AMD is bad too!).
