Lucky Newegg Lottery Winners Can Pay Full Price of PC Parts

A lottery for prized graphics cards and processors was briefly launched yesterday on the site of PC vendor Newegg. This is a testament to the continued dearth of all things gaming during the ongoing covid-19 pandemic.

The “Newegg Shuffle” event, the screenshots of which were saved on Imgur and first reported by PCMag, invited customers to choose from several bundles of AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and 7 5800X GPUs and various AMD motherboards. If selected, they would receive an email informing them and then a chance to purchase the lots from Newegg. The lottery system itself looks better than furiously trying to load an order page as new stock is grabbed by bots and scalpers, but the bundled add-ons meant that PC buyers were effectively entering a raffle. to be sold more specific material they were looking for.

“Exactly what GPU wrestling needed: RNG loot boxes,” wrote a commentator in a Reddit thread full of people immersed in the promotion. “The problem is, you don’t understand the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes with winning the chance to pay a huge mark-up for a combined item you don’t want,” replied another.

Newegg did not immediately respond to a request for Kotaku for comment, but said PCMag that the Shuffle event is currently only in beta testing, and future versions of it will also include single purchase items rather than entire bundles.

Nvidia and AMD both announced new ranges of high-end graphics cards last fall, and since then it has been nearly impossible for most people to get their hands on. This rarity is probably due to a number of factors, from strained supply chains due to the pandemic to many more people looking to beef up their gaming platforms while social distancing and working from home. Cryptocurrency miners are also a perpetual burden in the market for powerful PC components. Last week, Nvidia announced that the graphics card supplies “stay skinny until the first trimester. “

There have been similar shortages for next-gen gaming consoles – the new PS5 stock on Amazon is now sold out almost instantly – which has prompted many players to ask for some sort of sneaker-style lottery system to call. the dibs on the new stock as soon as it becomes available. It doesn’t seem to be in the cards any time soon. Hopefully if and when a system like this rolls out, it gets off to a better start than Newegg’s GPU lottery.