Giving away a bonus to your customers is a nice thing to do; watching them jump through hoops to get the bonus is less so.  Many companies have realized that offering a mail in rebate is a great way to look like you are doing something for your customers while at the same time ensuring a significant percentage of those customers never actually claim said MIR.  Strangely this practice has not impressed consumers.

NVIDIA started to embrace something similar towards the end of 2016 with GeForce Experience 3.0, requiring a mandatory login to get at beta drivers and more pertinently, giveaways.  That login requirement includes all the game bundles, such as the one announced yesterday.  Ars Technica reported something interesting this morning that anyone thinking of picking up one of the games bundles should be aware of; NVIDIA now intends to tie these game codes to hardware.  Currently you will need to sign into GFE, verify your code and then allow GFE to verify you have a GTX 1070 or 1080 installed in your system, which strongly suggests you will need to install software.  Ars speculates that this could one day be tied directly to a card via a hardwareID or serial number; making it impossible to give away.

The rational offered references an incident with Microsoft a few months back when "some Gears 4 Windows 10 keys were obtained illegitimately via our Nvidia promotion".  This was  thanks to a loophole created by Amazon's return policy.  Of course, some of those so called illegitimate installations were caused by someone giving or even selling the game key which they obtained legally, because they had already purchased Gears 4.  It is unclear if NVIDIA only pays for codes which are redeemed or if the money has already been invested; in the former it at least makes financial sense, if the latter then Bird Culture has an appropriate phrase.

Once again, everyone must be punished thanks to the overreaction caused by a few smegheads.  Keep this in mind when you are shopping in the future.

"GFE then performs "a hardware verification step to ensure the coupon code is redeemed on the system with the qualifying GPU." It's not yet clear whether the codes will be tied to a specific serial number/hardware identifier, or whether they will be tied to an overall product line like a GTX 1070 or GTX 1080."

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