14 DAY TRIAL // When Advanced Micro Devices first announced its plans to ship games for free with some of its video cards, only some of the best boards in its collection were included in the deal package. Now, though, even the low-end ones are part of the pie.
AMD calls its free game initiative the “Never Settle” program, obviously a play on the mentality that we should never settle for anything but the best.
Since Radeon-series graphics cards are never better or weaker than NVIDIA's boards by any significant margin, shipping freebies with them is a pretty good way of gaining more customers.
In recent months, NVIDIA has been unveiling similar deals, but they are few and far between, definitely not so rich in actual titles.
Advanced Micro Devices is exploiting this to the best of its ability, and might not really have a choice but to do so after failing to stay profitable in the first quarter of 2014.
Anyway, the Sunnyvale, California-based company has announced the first “Never Settle Forever” program that involves entry-level video cards.
That means that even the AMD Radeon R7 250X, R7 250 and R7 240 graphics adapters will ship with one or more games.
In fact, AMD has three selection sets now, fairly predictably called Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Bronze is the one that applies to low-end boards, but more on that later.
The games are bundled as “indie packs” composed of two titles each. There are four that you can select from: The Banner Saga (developed by Stoic Studio and published by Versus Evil), Dyad (developed and published by ][), Guacamelee! (developed and published by Drinkbox Studios), and Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack (by Drinkbox Studios).
Obviously, these games aren't close to the level of things like Tomb Raider and Crysis, but it's not like low-end video cards can play those things all that well anyway.
The new “Never Settle Forever” offer should already be live, or will be soon enough. The three choices (Gold, Silver and Bronze) differ based on the graphics card.
The Bronze reward means you only get one game (you get to select which, as we have said), and ships with the Radeon R7 240 and 250 cards. The Silver (2 game choices) is included with the Radeon R9 270 and R7 260 series. Finally, the Never Settle Forever Gold (3 games, as you might have guessed) applies to the R9 290, R9 290X, and R9 295 X2 dual-GPU board).
The promotion ends on August 31, but by then, AMD will probably have the next Never Settle game set ready to rumble.