A lottery for precious graphics cards and processors briefly appeared on the Newegg website of the PC parts seller yesterday. It is evidence of the continuing gaming deficit during the covid-19 pandemic.
The “Newegg Shuffle Event”, whose screenshot was saved on Imgur and first reported by PCMag, invited customers to choose from several AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and 7 5800X GPU packages and various AMD motherboards. If they were selected, they would receive an email announcing them and then have the chance to buy the packages from Newegg. The lottery system itself seems better than angrily trying to load an order page, while the new stock is captured by robots and scalers, but the bundled supplements meant that PC shoppers actually go into a raffle to get rather than actually getting just the specific hardware they were looking for.
“Exactly what the gpu fight needed: RNG loot boxes,” he wrote a commentator in a Reddit thread full of people sinking into the promotion. “The problem is that you don’t understand the feeling of pride and accomplishment that comes with winning the chance to pay a huge margin for a combined article that you don’t want,” said another.
Newegg did not immediately respond to a request for Kotaku for comment, but he said PCMag the fact that the Shuffle event is currently only beta tested, and future versions of it will also include single purchase items rather than entire packages.
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Nvidia and AMD have both announced new lines of high-end graphics cards last fall and it was almost impossible for most people to get their hands on it since. This lack is probably due to a number of factors, from tense supply chains due to the pandemic to many more people looking to strengthen their gaming platforms while socially distancing themselves and working from home. Cryptocurrency miners are also a perpetual burden on the market for powerful PC parts. Last week, Nvidia announced that graphics card consumables will “stay weak through Q1. ”
There were similar shortcomings for the latest gaming consoles – the new PS5 stock on Amazon ran out almost instantly – prompting many players to request some sort of sneaker-style lottery system to call dibs on the new stock as it becomes available. This doesn’t seem to be in the books anytime soon. Hopefully, if and when such a system launches, it starts better than Newegg’s GPU lottery.