A Question of (expected) Supply and Demand

[LWH]

Afternoon all,

As most of us in here have been, I've been thinking about the GPU supply issues and how to deal with the issue of supply being purchased instantly and resold with an extra zero added.

Hypothetical idea: If a consumer facing storefront (like OC) were to hold on to a significant number of cards (100+) and then release them all at the same time, with all their usual anti-bot, single item purchase rules in place, would that enable a greater number of people to get hold of one?

My thinking is that everyone has taken up the first pressure on the trigger and is ready to fire on a single card here or there, but if there were so many available in a single drop people would not be prepared with mechanisms to bypass the purchasing rules meaning the stock would go out to a greater variety of people.

Definitely not a solution or even a suggestion, and I invite you all to debate(read debunk) the idea.

 

[LWH]

I think releasing many cards at once is good for the buyer but less good for the seller

I'm sure man hours would be up, but they could be sold for the prevailing price I'd have thought.

 

[LWH]

a little off topic - but the problem with supply and demand and have a limited # of people needing (gamers) graphics cards. The Biggest factor in this mix is mining. As long as this exists (as long as you can make more money then what you expend) - demand will always be high.
I just read this today https://www.independent.co.uk/clima...mining-china-environment-carbon-b1827396.html
The all mighty 'dollar', Pound, Yuan is more important then anything else.
Do you know the best way to have reasonably priced GPUs? Bitcoin being 2000 again or less.
sorry this is off topic - but to the OP not sure if you heard about the 3 recent drops by ockers for gamers (or tried to be).

I had heard that Bitcoin wasn't the issue this time around and that Etherium had become the reckoning force. Rumours around them making mining irrelevant are floating around at the moment and I think the shift is happening this year although not sure when. Maybe this might bring some supply to the secondhand market...

And yes, I had seen the drops on these forums. It's a good idea but will only work on a small scale. (Not that I won't jump in if I see the card I want!)

they also need to retain a certain amount for prebuilt systems

I believe these are in a different stock list and don't directly impact the individual items on sale.

 

[LWH]

Won't work. Bots are faster than gamers, simple as that. We released 200 6700XTs via a voucher code published on this forum. All cards snapped up within 40 minutes. Mostly new customers with no order history and the number that ended up being scalped was ridiculous.

There's a trend here to blame miners, and maybe the miners are feeding the scalpers, but there's also a much bigger demand from gamers than most people believe. However, the core problem is scalper groups using bots and their patsy's who they pay to allow them to use their name & address details. We can't filter out duplicate orders if every order comes from a different "person".

Commercial bot protections don't really work, that was painfully apparent when a bug on the website allowed hundreds of bots to order in a matter of minutes a couple of weeks ago. Bots are now clever enough to bypass the common protections.

Interesting insight, thanks Scotti. Real shame. Out of interest do you guys have any figures comparing the demand you've seen on the 30XX launch compared to say 20XX? Obviously understand that these might be a bit too material for public forums would however be nice to quantify what the demand looks like comparatively.

Remember Bot Do not Add to cart.
They can bypass entire website Interface. They comunicate directly to a server using programing comands and stuff. Bot can make an order in fraction of a second. YES fraction of a second.

Human cant compete with a bot whos scaning the webpages sending requests every minute 24/7

Ignoring ethical or legal issue for the moment, do you think it would be possible to overwhelm those using these access points with empty requests?

Does reCAPTCHA actually work?

EDIT: That steam hardware thread is very interesting and answers the question of 20XX vs 30XX in terms of demand. I'm sure one could correlate the demand for this generation of GPUs with the growth in membership of a certain well-known internet sub forum