NV - The way it's meant to be played vs ATi Certified

Just a few questions of interest (non biased):

Does either of these camps really provide something usefull with their dev support to game devs, or is it money thrown for some ingame publicity?

Should this marketing extend to ingame videos (regardless of who's the best, I really dislike publicity stunts when playing any game with videos proclaiming the best experience using brand x)?

Just how would one define: the way a game should be played?

A bit from column A... a bit from column B.

Really they do help developers, but of course it's help to try and make it better on their hardware, and sometimes it's a little late in the developement (which is what I hear happened with Oblivion after it was pretty much built on the company's rigs that had primarily ATi cards).

Neither program guarantees dominance, but the perception that they do helps them sell to the uninformed. And in some cases TWIMTBP and GITG do follow performance (D3/HL2) Also it gets their name out there just like other marketing, especially if the logo is there at every start-up (usually you can hack the logos [loved the UT2K4 hack that changed the badges to a few different things]).