A lottery for valued graphics cards and processors posted a short time ago on PC parts seller Newegg’s website. This is proof of the ongoing shortage of all games during the ongoing covid-19 pandemic.
The “Newegg Shuffle Event”, of which the screen caps were saved on Imgur and first reported on by PCMag, invited customers to choose from several bundles of AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and 7 5800X GPUs and various AMD motherboards. If they are selected, they will receive an email in which they will give notice and then the chance to purchase the bundles from Newegg. The lottery system itself looks better than furiously trying to load an order page while new stock is being cut by bots and scalpers, but the accompanying additions have meant that PC buyers are effectively entering a lottery for the chance of being sold rather than to just the specific hardware they were looking for.
“Exactly what the GPU battle needed: RNG outer cabinets,” he wrote a commentator in a Reddit thread full of people dipping into the promotion. “The problem is that you do not understand the sense of pride and achievement that comes with the chance to pay a big premium for a combo item you do not want,” replied another.
Newegg did not immediately respond to a request from Kotaku for comment, but it does tell PCMag that the Shuffle Event is currently only beta-tested, and versions of it in the future will also include single purchase items rather than entire bundles.
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Nvidia and AMD both announced new lines of high-end graphics cards last fall, and it has since been nearly impossible for most people to get their hands on it. That scarcity is probably due to a number of factors, from strained supply chains due to the pandemic, to many more people wanting to improve their gaming equipment while socializing and working from home. Miners in cryptocurrency are also an eternal burden in the market for powerful computer parts. Last week, Nvidia announced that graphics card supplies’stay lean through Q1. ”
There were similar shortages for the next generation of game consoles – new PS5 shares on Amazon sold out almost immediately today – prompting many players to request some sort of sneaker-style lottery system to call dibs on new stock as it becomes available is. It does not appear to be in the cards anytime soon. Hopefully if and when such a system does start, it will start better than Newegg’s GPU lottery.