Semiconductor Shortage Has Affected the Gaming Industry.
If you have tried to acquire electronics recently, chances are you either failed to do so, or you paid a higher price for it. The reason behind the shortage started with big delays in shipping supplies since factories around the world had to shut down due to the global coronavirus pandemic. With time, apparently production normalized, however, people seem to be desperately acquiring electronic devices around the world. This consumer habit has affected the industry globally.
Scalpers Have Made it Worse.
Scalpers are groups of people dedicated to making profit by acquiring large quantities of a certain product and reselling them at a higher cost. They are looking for new products to come out, hog the market by acquiring the product online through many questionable methods, and later reselling them on other platforms.
This has been the case with the release of the PS5, and Xbox Series X last year. The shortage has extended to mid-2021 and seems to be going strong. The latest product to be affected by this are compute graphics cards. Nvidia released their RTX 3000 series last year, and it is impossible to get a hold of these through regular methods.
Crypto-mining: An Even Older Problem.
With the rise of crypto currency, miners have been using graphics cards to perform this task. Over the last few years this has impacted the PC gaming community due to the scarcity and soaring prices that GPUs have. You can mine cryptocurrency by verifying block chains of cryptocurrency transactions. Since this task is only profitable in high bulks, GPUs are used for this because of their efficiency and speed. They perform repetitive tasks better than CPUs, which are better for multiple tasks running simultaneously.
Many people and businesses are dedicated to this task, and they purchase large quantities of GPUs for their mining needs. This has created a high demand in the GPU market, hence the rise in prices by retail, and scarcity by manufacturers. You can even find old GPUs selling for prices even higher than the one they had on release.
The Solutions Are Not Ideal
To address the scalping problem, some retailers are limiting purchases of Xbox, PS5, and even some electronics to just one or two per customer. Whether you go in store or purchase it online, these stores will not sell you large quantities. Scalpers use bots and multiple accounts to oversee this measure, so it is not ideal for consumers who must wait in virtual lines or be on the prowl when the inventory is released by the retail store. Some scalpers have inside information of release times.
Nvidia on the other hand is releasing a line of GPUs named the CMP HX that are tailored for crypto mining. This has created a distress in consumers because Nvidia is segmenting an already scarce inventory. The idea was to separate actual gamers from miners. However the shortage of chips and semiconductors has deemed this solution as suboptimal because it is even harder to find GPUs on retail, and the prices are ridiculous.
For the time being it seems that this issue will remain. Economies are slowly waking, and manufacturers are languidly increasing their production. It seems that time is the only ally for consumers at the moment.
What are your thoughts on the scarcity of electronics, especially gaming-related ones like consoles or video cards? Were you able to get a PS5 or Xbox? How about the new Nvidia RTX 3000 series? Let me know in the comments down below.
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