Buying in 2020 Is Like Friday The 13th All The Time
2020 Has been awful (generally speaking), but it’s also seen the releases and planned releases of some of the most powerful gaming hardware EVER. From the NVIDIA 3000 series graphics cards, to the new PS5 and Xbox Series consoles, to AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series CPUs, and eventually AMD’s RDNA 2 GPU architecture, it’s an exciting time to be a gamer.
Problem is, no one can buy any of it. These products, despite months of hype and in many cases promises of “plenty of availability”, sell out within seconds every time they release. Some of this is out of anyone’s control. COVID has limited our ability to rush to stores and line up, and has reduced the production capabilities of both Samsung and TSMC. Samsung is the company physically making NVIDIA’s GPUs, while TSMC does the fabricating for AMD. For those wondering how this might impact XBOX and PS5, both use a customized version of AMD’s Ryzen processors and RDNA 2 graphics, so any impact on AMD directly affects the availability of XBOX and PS5. In combination with a trade war between the U.S. and China, this ultimate storm does lead to limited availability overall. That part is understandable.
But then we have the issue of scalpers. Scalping is not a new thing. The concept is pretty simple, buy a valued commodity, preferably one that is hard to get, and sell it at a higher value than what you paid for it. It’s something that is commonly done with tickets, limited edition items such as shoes or designer wear, that type of thing. It’s not “new” in the gaming space, but previously it was normally seen with collectors edition items, not what feels like the majority of available stock for console or components. That is however what we’re seeing. If you look at the time of this writing, 8:43 a.m. on Friday November 11th 2020, there are listings for each device at these prices in U.S. dollars on eBay, followed by the actual retail price:
Xbox Series X- $8900, retail $499
Playstation 5- $32,000, retail $499
NVIDIA RTX 3080 -$3,999, retail $699
AMD Ryzen R5 5600x - $699, retail $299.
If we were playing the price is right these people lose. Badly.
Given the ever straining relationship between streamers/gamers and the music industry involving DMCA for music (even in game music) and streaming some readers may find it ironic that part of the solution to this issue may come from legislation past on behest of the music industry. In 2016 the United States government signed into law the Better Online Ticket Sales Act. The BOTS Act. This act made the act of buying up tickets for concerts and in person events via bots illegal, effectively eliminating digital scalping on a wide scale. While it’s still possible to manually purchase and resell tickets, the process takes much longer than a bot making it a far less frequent occurrence. It may be time to expand that law to online retail sales in general.
Another possibility would be that retailers such as Newegg, Walmart, Amazon, Target, Best Buy etc. put more “I’m not a robot” captcha verifications in place for high demand and potentially low supply items. Although given how the gaming industry in general seems to want to pat itself on the back for all of these “successful” launches I get the general impression that they don’t care who buys these consoles or why, as long as they buy them. From the top down perspective of retailers that makes perfect sense, but these scalpers are taking what should be one of the most exciting times in gaming and making it one of the most frustrating for end users. Ultimately, it may fall on us to make enough noise, to annoy enough people in the government in order to force them into action, because as long as these items remain in high demand, and as long as securing them for scalpers is as simple as DDOSing sites like Walmart in order to make it nearly impossible to purchase them every time new stock comes in, there are large profits to be made for “resellers”.
-Tim
