Hardware shortages are not uncommon, but the pandemic has made things worse. With the entire planet locked down at home, people are looking for ways to keep themselves busy. One of those ways is gaming, but it seems that the high demand has made it impossible to find a new high-end graphics card, such as the AMD Ryzen 5000 and Nvidia RTX 3000 GPUs. Newegg is seizing the opportunity and proposing a controversial solution: lotteries.
If you want to buy an Nvidia RTX 3080 now, you can. However, you'll likely pay about double the retail price at a reseller on eBay or Amazon. That's been the case for months. That's why Newegg is trying something new.
This week, the company posted a page on its website explaining its proposal. The “Newegg Shuffle” event will allow interested customers to enter a raffle for select products — the raffle will last three hours. Sometimes these events offer highly sought-after hardware. AMD and Nvidia have admitted to severe shortages of their GPUs, so it’s possible that some of their products will be entered into the raffle.
Newegg has a specific plan – those who win the lottery will be contacted by email to complete purchases . The products will be sold to the winners on a first-come, first-served , and the winners will only have two hours to complete their purchase before Newegg moves on to the next person on the list. With this system, you won’t have to rely on keeping an eye on when new stock will appear to buy the products before everyone else. Instead, you’ll have to rely on Newegg’s random number generator to do you a favor.
The company says that future Shuffle events will include individual items in addition to combos. However, we don't know exactly when they will take place. It's possible that these raffles will still be your best chance to get a CPU or GPU in the near future.
Information source: extremetech.com
