A raffle for prized graphics cards and processors briefly went up yesterday at PC part vendor Newegg’s site. It’s a testament to the ongoing shortage of everything gaming related during the ongoing covid-19 pandemic.
The ‘Newegg Shuffle Event’, of which there were screen caps stored on Imgur and first reported by PCMag, invited customers to choose from different bundles of AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and 7 5800X GPUs and various AMD motherboards. If selected, they would receive an email with a notification and then be given the chance to purchase Newegg’s bundles. The lottery system itself seems better than furiously trying to load an order page while new shares are snatched up by bots and scalpers, but the bundled add-ons meant that PC shoppers basically entered a lottery for the chance to be sold rather than alone the specific hardware they were looking for.
“Just what the GPU battle needed: RNG loot boxes,” he wrote a commentator in a Reddit thread full of people thinking about the promotion. “The problem is you don’t understand the sense of pride and achievement that comes with winning the chance to pay a huge raise for a combo item you don’t want,” replied another.
Newegg did not immediately respond to a request from Kotaku for comment, but told it PCMag that the Shuffle Event is currently only beta-tested, and versions of it will include individual purchase items in the future, rather than full bundles
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Nvidia and AMD have both announced new lines of high-end graphics cards last fall, and since then it has been nearly impossible for most people to get their hands on them. That scarcity is probably because of a number of factorsfrom congested supply chains due to the pandemic to many more people looking to strengthen their gaming platform while working remotely and from home. Cryptocurrency miners are too a constant burden in the market for powerful PC parts. Last week, Nvidia announced that the graphics card supplies “stay lean by Q1. “
There were similar shortages for the next generation of game consoles – the new PS5 stock on Amazon today sold out almost immediately – prompting many players to request some sort of sneaker-style lottery system to request dibs on new stock as it becomes available . That does not seem to be in the cards quickly. Hopefully, if and when such a system rolls out, it will get off to a better start than Newegg’s GPU lottery.