Well, it will be hard to prove this is illegal. I doubt there is an history of situations like this one that define legislation for it.
At least in the E.U., the legislation is usually broad enough to have a judge decide whether the contracts being made are monopolistic moves that harm the consumer or not.
nvidia wants to take over the "High-End Gaming" sub-brands from the major OEMs that sell graphics cards from different IHVs. And they're doing so by offering "special incentives" to the OEMs who join the GPP program.
But determining if these are incentives or actually threats may depend on historical data. Did nvidia historically offer these incentives to all brands who sold their GPUs? If so, then "not offering the incentives" to OEMs who choose not to join the program can be interpreted as coercion.
Or even without the historical data, stating that an AIB who doesn't join GPP is automatically left out from being mentioned during formal announcements for new GPUs, or an AIB who doesn't join GPP automatically gets to the end of the line for getting the new chips definitely sounds like coercion to me.
The way I see it, AIBs get little choice but to join GPP. The market might be relaxed on their end for now because of the mining craze, but once that goes away it'll be cut-throat territory all over again and they'll need the
incentives from the IHV with >70% of discrete GPU marketshare.
@Ryan Smith decided to call the issue as "petty from both sides" in a tweet, later stating that's the reason they don't feel it's important enough to cover it.
He's welcome to further explain but I'd say it's for two reasons:
a) AIBs can just create sub-brands for AMD products which (in their opinion) won't change the big picture that much and
b) it's not a technical issue and AT only very rarely gets into political/legislation/marketing issues.
Now again, AT are definitely technical experts, but not marketing experts IMHO. The problem with
a) is that "High-End Gaming" sub-brands (e.g.
Asus STRIX/ROG,
MSI Gaming,
Gigabyte AORUS, etc.) get a substantially larger portion of the total card sales. Which is predictable because the AIBs' marketing money are more focused on said sub-brands.
There's a very well established "
price-per-customer" that AIBs have invested in over the last decade, and GPP aims to appropriate this investment to their cards alone, through
friendly coercion.
So AMD graphics cards now have to be pushed to new sub-brands whose name no one knows and will have to be built from scratch.
Can this
really hurt AMD? Definitely.
When the mining craze gets settled, most PC gamers who are happy with their current ROG STRIX / Gaming X card will probably look for another ROG STRIX / Gaming X card when they return to the store for an upgrade.
So is it
petty for nvidia to create contracts that coerce AIBs to appropriate all the marketing efforts for premium gaming sub-brands towards geforce cards? No, IMO it's monopolistic.
Is it
petty for AMD to complain about that? Yes from a technical POV. Definitely not from a marketing POV.
I am not clinging, it takes time to go through this properly, like I have for Asus and Gigabyte for now, but you started to accuse me of being an apologist,etc...
Because that pretty much summarizes the majority of your posts in this thread (which started with a weird strawman argument about Sapphire).
@Kaotik wasn't the first and won't be the last to point that out.
