From November 13 to December 12th 2014 Nvidia ran a contest called the Green Box Giveaway. To enter all you had to do was share your favorite Portal or Half-life moment on Twitter and use two hashtags to mark your entry; #nvidia #GreenBox. The contest page said that winners would be announced "on or about Dec. 12th 2014." That day came and went. Then a week went by. Then a month. Then two, and now it's been three. There were two prize packages. One was a Portal Gun, the other a Gravity Gun, both signed by Gabe Newell. I've emailed the contact from the contest rules page about the contest. According to the rules you're allowed to ask who won. The winners were supposed to be announced on the contest page, but never were. Now the page is down and you just get a 404 error. You can still see the page on the wayback machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20141118075339/http://shield.nvidia.com/whatisgreenbox/ I know this might make me sound entitled, since it's free stuff. But I am a little upset that they promote and run a contest, but then not follow through or give any sort of update about it. An, "Oops. This was a mistake. It's been cancelled" would have been nice. The effort to enter was minimal, so they don't owe anyone anything but an explanation really, but I would like that much. The contact for the contest is Kris Rey, krey@nvidia.com. I've emailed him once a month for three months now. I'm not being angry or pushy. I just want an update. There were ~100 decent entries when I searched twitter for the hash tags. Should I care? Should I just give up? Does anyone know someone at Nvidia who will actually follow up on this? Thanks.
I don't disagree. I even say as much in my first post. But I still think it's odd that a company as big as Nvidia would just flake on something like this. I mean, bit-tech has giveaways where the only thing you have to do to enter is post in a thread. Not often, but they do it. I think people would be irritated if bit-tech staff never announced a winner, ignored inquiries, and eventually just deleted the contest thread as if it never existed. So, yeah. First world problem for sure, but still a problem, and one I would like to see come kind of closure to, even if it's just a, "yeah this was an accident," or "the guy in charge of this didn't have authorization to do it," or "the guy who was running this quit. Sorry about that."
Yeah, that reminds me, I still have to pick a winner for my PSU giveaway thread. Work has just been dialling up the crazy to 11.
I'm going to bump this. I've posted in the Nvidia forums with no responses yet. Once a month I send some tweets to the @nvidia twitter profiles. I've sent a DM on twitter to Kris Rey, the guy who was in charge of this, but he's never replied, and I've sent him an email once a month since January 12th (one month after this contest was supposed to be over). I really wouldn't care if they just said, "We cancelled this," but I would like the corporate silent treatment to end. I've politely engaged them in every way I can think of but they haven't responded to anything. It would be nice if there was someone here with a contact who could get a quick answer to this.
Yeah this just sounds disappointing. It's a weird situation as clearly nobody truly lost out or anything, it's just a bit shoddy on behalf of the organisers. IMO if you run a contest you should see it through to the end, even if it's something really menial. I'm experiencing something similar with Linus Tech Tips and htei featured build logs comp. I won the recent one, the prize is simply having your build featured in the WAN show. No items, no cash, just some simple recognition and a little bit of exposure. But for some reason the competition voting ran over by a whole month, not only that, but now it's over I've had two messages saying it would be in a show when it hasn't. That's just annoying. I stayed up to watch the shows live on Twitch so I could be present in the chat to show my gratitude and maybe answer any questions. That's time wasted, I'd rather have been sleeping thank you very much. We live in a world where a small promise like that holds no weight, but then we complain when people don't keep their word on larger issues. It would be nice if things were just simple for a change and people kept their little promises more often. It's certainly not a bad thing to want Nvidia in this case to hold true to their word, that's quite a cool prize after all. I have a singular dislike for Valve, but I'd still want a decent portal/gravity gun replica actually signed by GabeN.
I agree. When a company runs a competition, it isn't because they're feeling generous. They know the competition will generate a certain amount of interest and act as a form of promotion for their product/website or whatever. Not holding up their end of the deal is very shoddy IMO.
So it seems I've finally been annoying enough. If only you guys could see the polite monthly emails I've sent . . . No seriously. I'm really polite in all of them. Yesterday I got onto a chat support and asked what happened. I think it helped that there's now an archive of the rules page. The person on chat said that they would have to get back to me via email. The automated email said the response should be in less than 24 hours. I figured for something this odd that it might be longer, but after 24 hours I emailed for an update anyway. Someone replied that it was probably going to take longer and that they had emailed the person who was supposed to be in charge of this contest (I'm assuming Kris Rey, mentioned above). I sent Kris Rey a link to the contest rules page on twitter today asking him if he realized he was the contact for this contest. That (possibly combined with an email he might be getting through Nvidia intranet) got him to reply via twitter asking me to DM him. And that's where we are. Yes I'm a little obsessed, but every time I see Nvidia promote some other contest on twitter I can't help but be reminded of this other contest they started but never finished. Also, we are nearing the half-year mark on this. I'd like an answer and some closure.
Quick and final update. I talked to Kris and the short of it is that they screwed up the contest and had to cancel it quietly. I've always been really polite in all my (attempted) communications, and per Kris' request I'll keep that up and not divulge any more details. He did say many times that he "had to eat crow" both when cancelling the contest and now when talking to me. So in short there will never be winner (which is what I figured), but now I know for sure. I feel bad for Kris. Like most people, he's doing his best and messed up a bit. I wish him future success at Nvidia. Hopefully he'll get to run another cool contest soon.
Seems unusual for someone to take six months to admit they made a mistake. Especially when point 10 on the rules gives everyone the right to bail out of the competition. Even more so when its as trivial an issue as giving away a toy gun, a teddy bear and a mug. I mean why not just issue a generic "due to unforeseen blah de blah we regrettably have to cancel the competition...apologies...watch for more great competitions in the future...more generic pr blurb....sincerely employee" and be done with it. Any further grumblings can be followed up by pointing to the T&Cs. I'm bemused by this whole scenario really.
That's why I was so confused. I get quietly shutting it down, but not responding to polite requests for an answer . . . that was odd. But now we know.
