Right, this is going to be a complicated story to explain. As you guys know I have been rather critical towards what Nvidia is doing with GeForce Experience. At first it was intended to be a platform that automatically set preferred game settings in relation to a game.
Then Nvidia came with the idea that all driver downloads would be exclusive towards GFE. Then in a later stage they forced a login to be able to download the driver. Now they did change their mind here as they still offer the drivers as separate download. Somewhere in-between it all Nvidia started collecting all kinds of data and information with GeForce Experience. The GFE application reads out your settings, software and hardware. To date nobody really knows what Nvidia is doing with that big-data that ends up in a cloud at Nvidia.
The new chapter for GeForce experience is that all that data is tied towards a user account. If you haven’t noticed, in order to be able to use GFE for the most simplistic things like recording etc you actually need to (are forced) to login to the software these days. This means that Nvidia is creating profiles based on your email address, Nvidia account, Google account and/or a facebook account.
You cannot use GeForce Experience without a mandatory forced login to redeem your game-code
And now we arrive at last weeks game bundle. Last week Nvidia introduced a new game bundle for the GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080. Here’s what is happening, in order to redeem the game codes , you’ll are now forced to have GeForce Experience installed and to be logged in (which is mandatory these days). Nvidia is claiming to do this so that keys will not be resold or given away to your friends. However from here on-wards things get very tricky, Nvidia is now using that GFE data and will be checking your user-info and ties that towards your hardware. E.g. the game-codes will only handed out if you have that GeForce GTX 1070 or 1080 physically installed on your PC. So again, when you redeem the game code that card HAS to be installed in your system and you HAVE to be logged into GFE.
This new chapter has started with the For Honor en Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands Bundle. While Nvidia claims this all has nothing to do with spying, tracking, or other immoral activities, it surely is getting scary to see what they have been doing in the past year or so with GFE.
In my prediction it will not be long before the parties like perhaps EU Commission will start an investigation on Nvidia, they are collecting system and user data of millions of end-users through GeForce Experience. First you spend hundreds of euros/dollars on a graphics cards and then if you want to fully use the features and software they are forcing you to login to their system allowing them to harvest and track data. While many people will have no problem with data-collection, I find the recent developments to have become rather scary – free games or not.
Nvidia’s updated terms and conditions for promotional codes are listed in its latest bundle, which offers the choice of For Honor or Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands with the purchase of a GTX 1070 or GTX 1080. Now there is a secondary discussion here as well, if you spend 750 euros/usd on your GeForce GTX 1080 which comes with a free game, why shoudn’t it be able for you to giveaway that code if you own the game already – or perhaps make a few bucks by selling it ?
Over the past year GFE slowly is moving from a fairly handy utility towards enforced bloatware it seems. Perhaps I am looking at it in a different way though. I would love to hear from you guys in our forums whether all this is morally acceptable, or us just being a bit too paranoid from my side?.
