The Price Tag of Exclusivity: ATI and Valve

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday July 6, 2005 @05:33AM from the win-win dept.

The Inquirer has a piece up breaking down the millions of dollars ATI spent securing a "special relationship" with Valve prior to Half-Life 2 being released. The relationship resulted in a voucher being included with ATI cards for a free copy of Valve's hit game. From the article: "ATI gave Valve $2.4 million in cash for the deal. ATI also invested $1.2 million in marketing this great game. And last, but not least, was a cool $4.4 million that ATI and its partners spent for bundles. That amounts to some $8 million dollars....[ATI] sold an incredible lot of 9800XT and 9600XT cards just because of the nice voucher [for Half-Life 2]. That small piece of paper convinced many people to go out and buy an ATI card." A little salt with this article will help it go down easier.

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ATI troubles by niskel · 2005-07-06 05:38 · Score: 5, Interesting

I got an ATI card because I was told it had better performance than nvidia, especially in HL2. Now that I have my 9800, I realize what a waste it was, especially in Linux. HL2 was okay but definetely not worth getting this card for, especially for all the trouble it has caused (in an amd64 system). Next time I'm going nvidia.