NVIDIA often sells its graphics cards with bundled games. Customers don’t get a disc but they do receive a game code which enables them to download whatever game is being offered with the graphics card for free. As you can probably imagine, this has given birth to a cottage industry of sorts where people who don’t want the game simply sell the code and basically save some money on their graphics card. This sort of behavior doesn’t sit well with NVIDIA and it has now decided to clamp down on this exercise.
The code that NVIDIA sent out with some graphics cards could be redeemed via its website and customers would then get a key from websites like Steam, Origin, or Microsoft. There was no way to tell whether the person redeeming the code and downloading the free game was actually the person who bought the card.
NVIDIA has now made a policy change which clearly states that the free game codes “are intended for use by the purchaser.” Customers will now have to redeem the codes through their GeForce Experience app account which will then link to the relevant game store. It doesn’t end there.
“To ensure that the coupon code is redeemed on the system with the qualifying GPU,” it’s also going to perform a hardware check. They only workaround that comes to mind here is that the code could be sold to someone who has the same GPU since NVIDIA hasn’t said that this is going to be tied to one particular card.
Some think that this is merely a ploy by NVIDIA to get people to sign up for its GeForce Experience app while others believe that it has decided to do this after some customers bought the GTX 1070 card for the express purpose of redeeming the free Gears of War 4 code after which they returned the card and got a free game out of it.
What do you think? Is it okay for NVIDIA to make customers go through this additional step just to redeem a free game code?