Nvidia is highly dependent on the game publishers making sure their games work well with Nvidia cards. The whole "best played on Nvidia" thing would fall apart if publishers stopped working with them. Unfortunately, this leads to them being unable to be more of an opponent here.
A third party would need to sue them or the government would have to introduce legislation to stop this bullshit. I'm not hopefully that either will happen in the near future, which is sad. Compared to e.g. Stadia Geforce Now has the far more customer friendly business model.
Nvidia has like 85% of the market share for discrete cards. Releasing a game that doesn't work with Nvidia cards in the PC game space would mean flushing your entire release and all your publishers money. Nobody on earth is withholding support for Nvidia as a bargaining chip in the PC gaming space.
The actual issue is vastly more trivial copyright makes it easy to forbid such and even if present license didn't forbid it then fighting in court would be as expensive as it is pointless because license v2 would certainly do the job. The only path forward is via willing cooperation.
> Nvidia has like 85% of the market share for discrete cards. Releasing a game that doesn't work with Nvidia cards in the PC game space would mean flushing your entire release and all your publishers money. Nobody on earth is withholding support for Nvidia as a bargaining chip in the PC gaming space.
Nvidia has that market share because Nvidia has a very big team doing nothing but working either directly with game developers or on pre-release versions of games (provided by the publishers) to make sure that the games work perfect on their cards from day one. No one needs to release a game that doesn't work on Nvidia cards, just not providing that access would be incredible damaging for Nvidia and Nvidia knows that.
The problem is that you are fabricating this picture of the world from whole cloth with no corroborating evidence and it doesn't even make sense. Who would threaten to sabotage their own entire operations in the PC space and why would they do that instead of relying on copyright and licensing which trivially provide a means to achieve the same ends.
If Call of Duty N doesn't have terms in its license that forbid NVIDIA's use case the best case scenario for NVIDIA would be fighting a protracted and expensive legal battle to establish this meanwhile Call of Duty N+1 includes slightly different wording that clearly establishes this limitation.
There is no need for coercion its clear as day that the only reasonable path forward for NVIDIA is willing collaboration with manufacturers.
Basically stop spinning stories to explain what is already trivially explicable.
A third party would need to sue them or the government would have to introduce legislation to stop this bullshit. I'm not hopefully that either will happen in the near future, which is sad. Compared to e.g. Stadia Geforce Now has the far more customer friendly business model.