FarCry 3 sales highlight AMD’s graphics challenge

If your local supermarket starts to hand out free milk, how much milk will you buy from another store?  We reckon ‘much less'. Data just in to KitGuru highlights the present disparity in sales for GeForce and Radeon in the channel. The abacus gets a dusting off as we ponder the significance of software sales data.

A huge number of you downloaded the KitGuru Annual Awards article at the start of January. It covers all of the major component areas, with detailed analysis before a winner is appointed in each category. After reading it – and then following the links to both the 6GB Sapphire 7970 Toxic and VTX3D 7870 Black – you'd be forgiven for thinking that AMD pushed out some of the best cards in 2012. And you'd be right.

But when it comes to the market as a whole, most people buy mainstream cards. In that market segment, a lot of responsibility goes to the reseller/store where you buy from. They will be pushing offers based on the stock available in the channel. In other words, if there's loads of nVidia stock in the market, then THAT is what you will see on the shelves – which will influence what you end up buying.

When AMD launched its ‘Never Settle' campaign for Q4, it was warmly welcomed by gamers who could get games like FarCry 3, Hit Man Absolution and Sleeping Dogs bundled with every card from the Radeon HD 7770 and above.

So that brings us to the headline.

Fact: The top selling game in our market for December was FarCry 3. That means that more money was taken in our stores, for Far Cry 3, than any other game.

But it was FREE with many AMD cards.

So who would BUY this game?

We reckon it must be people who did NOT get it for free.

Which must mean a significant number of nVidia GeForce customers did make the purchase.

Over at CES, nVidia's former head of global GPU sales, Roy Taylor, is busy plotting a crusade toward redressing the balance between AMD and nVidia in the channel. AMD's CSO John Byrne has been quoted as saying “Roy’s enthusiasm and passion for technology evangelization will help strengthen our channel business as we bring new low-power APUs and discrete GPUs to market in 2013”.  Hmm…  We'll revisit this area in a while and let you know what progress (good or bad) is being made.

KitGuru says: One of the reasons you need to pay a game publisher so much for a bundling deal, is because the software companies know that sales will be lost in the high street. Doing a deal on a game, which subsequently hits number one spot week after week, is not quite the perfect result for a bundler.

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KitGuru says:

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