A lottery for award-winning graphics cards and processors was launched yesterday on the PC parts seller Newegg’s website. It is proof of the continuing scarcity of all types of games during the covid-19 pandemic.
The “Newegg Shuffle Event”, screencaps of which were saved in Imgur and first reported by PCMag, invited customers to choose from several AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and 7 5800X GPU packages and several AMD motherboards. If they were selected, they would receive an email notifying them and then the chance to purchase Newegg packages. The lottery system itself looks better than trying to furiously load an order page while the new stock is captured by bots and money changers, but the included add-ons meant that PC buyers were effectively entering a lottery for the chance to be sold instead of actually getting just the specific hardware they were looking for.
“Exactly what the gpu fight needed: RNG loot boxes”, he wrote a commentator on a Reddit topic full of people diving into the promotion. “The problem is that you don’t understand the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes with the chance to pay a large margin for a combination item that you don’t want,” replied another.
Newegg did not immediately respond to a request for Kotaku to comment, but said PCMag that the Shuffle Event is currently only being beta tested, and future versions of it will also include single-purchase items instead of entire packages.
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Nvidia and AMD announced new high-end graphics card lines last fall, and they have been almost impossible for most people ever since. This scarcity is probably due to a number of factors, from strained supply chains due to the pandemic for many more people looking to improve their gaming platforms while socializing and working from home. Cryptocurrency miners are also a perpetual burden in the market for powerful PC parts. Last week, Nvidia announced that video card supplies “stay thin during the first trimester. “
There was a similar shortage of high-end game consoles – the new PS5 stock on Amazon today sold out almost instantly – prompting many players to request some kind of tennis-style lottery system to bet on the new stock as soon as it becomes available. This doesn’t seem to be in the cards anytime soon. Hopefully, if and when such a system is implemented, it will have a better start than Newegg’s GPU lottery.