A mainland Chinese distributor of Nvidia Corp products is looking to boost sales of the US firm’s graphics cards – hardware used by gamers to crank up computing performance – by offering these in a promotion with Black Myth: Wukong, the country’s first triple-A video game.
Guangzhou-based Maxsun, which distributes products based on Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices technologies, is offering free digital keys to action role-playing game Black Myth: Wukong for each purchase of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4070, 4080 and 4090 series graphics card or computers equipped with these hardware until June 18.
A standard copy of Black Myth: Wukong is priced at 268 yuan (US$37). The video game, developed by Tencent Holdings-backed studio Game Science, is set to be released on August 20 for Windows and Sony’s PlayStation 5.
Maxsun’s offbeat promotion reflects growing competition in the mainland graphics card market, where consumers are substituting Nvidia’s products with alternative made-in-China hardware from Moore Threads Technology, a graphics processor start-up that was added to Washington’s trade blacklist last October.
Still, a number of mainland gamers have derided this novel marketing ploy by Maxsun, owned by Shangke Information Technology.
“This promotion has limited appeal because GPU [graphics processing unit] sellers should focus on their target market,” said Helen Ding, a gamer from northeast Liaoning province. “Those who want the game don’t want to buy a new GPU.”
Initial domestic pre-orders of Black Myth Wukong are already oversubscribed, showing pent-up demand on the mainland, according to a South China Morning Post report on Tuesday. The title will also be available on Tencent’s flagship video gaming portal WeGame and rival platform Steam.
Mainland gamer Richard Chen was one of those who pre-ordered a physical copy of the deluxe edition of Black Myth: Wukong that costs 1,998 yuan. “I won’t buy a new GPU for the game because it isn’t worth paying around 5,000 yuan for the game [under that promotion],” he said.
The global video gaming GPU market is forecast to reach US$15.7 billion in 2029, up from a projected US$3.7 billion this year, according to market research firm Morder Intelligence.
Over the past few years, graphics cards – once Nvidia’s bread-and-butter business – have been surpassed by demand for the US company’s advanced GPUs used for training artificial intelligence systems.
