Ok, clearly you aren't talking about Activision Blizzard, which is what I, and presumably most other people, would think of when hearing the words 'world's largest game publisher'.
Nintendo's games sales dwarfs Activision's.
Some people don't like nVidia's handling of PhysX not because they're ATI fanboys or anti-PhysX but because they aren't blinded by bias and can see how PhysX, in its current form, can fracture the market.
Of course it will fracture the market until their is something to take its place. What I can't comprehend is why people will lame the blame at the feet of someone who is trying to do something instead of those that refuse to. It make no sense to me. If PhysX didn't exist, ATi users wouldn't see anything different in their games. As of right now, the difference is that nV users get to turn on some extra graphics effects as a bonus- and this leads people to lament nVidia. Why? If it truly does upset people, why not push the other players to do something about it and come up with an alternative? Instead, what we see is people lamenting the one company that has actively been pushing advancement because they are pushing advancement.
Now lets modify your statement. PhysX supports more ATI based hardware used for gaming, by a huge margin, than Nvidia hardware (124M vs. 32M). That's kinda sad isn't it? You can add the PC numbers if you like, that won't help much.
PhysX capable cards on the PC cleared 100Million at the beginning of last year. Enthusiast boards may confuse things a bit, but nV outsells ATi by a lot.
Consoles run 'software'/CPU PhysX, as can all PCs, only NV cards can run hardware PhysX... why would you say PhysX runs on all consoles and 66% of the PC market when it either runs on all consoles and all PCs, or it just runs on 66% of the PC market. Youre being rather fuzzy here.
My point in only using 66% was that those are the PCs that can benefit from GPU accelerated physics, so a developer can use a baseline physics engine that will still run on the consoles and used more advanced features on the PC. Pointing out software physics on the PC side does nothing as Havok will do the same there, or any other physics middleware. Pointing out the PhysX will run on the other platforms was strictly about it being portable which like it or not is a very real requirement for most game publishers today.
UnrealEngine runs on PS3, Xbox 360, PC etc, and it runs on ATI, NV, whatever. And that's how it should be. You make middleware, and it runs on systems using the standard API(s) for that system.
Back in the proprietary API days I was a fan of Glide because it was the only truly viable API to get the task done. Right now it is the same with PhysX. Certainly you can get things to work using something else, but certainly not with the same results in terms of performance. There are several other physics middleware packages that have been talking about supporting GPU acceleration and being more open, when they hit I will rather quickly switch support. Until then, something>>>>>>>nothing.
Honestly though.. DirectCompute is going to have a lot of weight behind it once MS pushes it through their next Xbox console, so even if CUDA is better represented in hardware now I don't think it will matter much. Maybe we'll see a physics engine take advantage of that in a couple years as the video cards will all support it well by then too.
You think CUDA will be excluded from the PS4? I don't know one way or the other, mainly I'm just pointing that out as it comes back around to MS is a company with a vested interest in not being ideal for portability. The same can be said for nVidia, it's just they actually support a larger percentage of gaming platforms with their software then MS currently does.