Although its Never Settle game bundling promo helped move a lot of Radeons in the past couple of years, AMD quietly let the program lapse before the launch of its R9 290 series graphics cards—and really didn’t need any sales help once its GPUs became the sweethearts of the cryptocurrency mining world. Happily, the tight supply-and-demand situation for Radeon cards appears to have eased lately, and AMD has decided to re-institute its game bundling program, mostly in the same form as the Never Settle Forever promo from last summer.
Starting today, folks who purchase Radeon graphics cards “at select retailers” will get to take their choice from a pool of games. If you buy a more expensive card, you’ll get more games and better choices. Here’s an overview of the three tiers available and the video cards tied to them.
The selection of games has changed from last time, of course. The pool of choices is bigger than ever and includes a couple of notable additions, including the upcoming Murdered: Soul Suspect and Thief. Also new are four prominent indie games, shown below:
These indie games will be packed together in pairs, and each of those two-game packs counts as only a single game selection. If that’s clear as mud, here’s an incredibly shrunk-down representation of the whole scheme that will only serve to confuse you further.
So a person who bought a Radeon R9 290 and got a Gold-tier bundle could make Thief, Alan Wake, and the indie two-pack of The Banner Saga and Mutant Blobs Atack!!! their three choices.
In addition to the new-new games, AMD has added some “classic” titles to the options, as shown above. The availability of games varies some by region, but the entire roster is available in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
Although all of these additions have merit, some pretty big names have been dropped from the choices this time around. The losses include Saints Row IV, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, and Devil May Cry. I hate to see ’em go.
Then again, AMD is constantly reshuffling the deck of available games, and it says Radeon buyers will have the option of delaying their game choices until the end of August 2014, if they wish. It’s possible the options will look better at some point between now and then, as new games are released and added to the ranks.