As it stands right now in April of 2021, all next-generation gaming and graphical hardware is still pretty much impossible to acquire unless you are a scalper using AI purchasing bot tools. It is unachievable for any normal consumer to buy a new Playstation 5, or an XBOX Series X/S, or a GeForce RTX 3000 series GPU, or an AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPU. These types of units have been unattainable since October, November, December of 2020 etc or when they all had their respective debuts recently.
What's new is that Crypto-currency miners are now involved. Crypto-currency companies are now using bots to buy up all of the new next-generation GeForce RTX, and AMD Radeon RX GPU's (Graphics Processing Units otherwise known as Video Cards) in order to use them in crypto-coin hashing calculations and crypto-mining operations. This creates another huge problem and effectively keeps these useful GPU's out of the hands of gamers, and content creators and video editors alike.
The bots + scalpers are the biggest most obvious issue but are only part of the problem.
There is the abysmal quandary of not having enough units to meet the demand in the first place.
There is also the dilemma in which the manufacturers, and distributors are not setting rules for how the products are distributed by retailers. The manufacturers and distributors probably don't even give a damn since they are just able to just offload their full stock, and are already meeting their quota and getting paid.
An additional frustration is that retailers themselves are doing little or not enough to fight, let alone stop AI purchasing bots via the online avenue.
Similar in fashion to the manufacturers and distributors, the retailers probably just don't care about the actual consumers because they are able to just offload their entire stock to bots & scalpers and are still able to get paid. They don't really care if the product actually reaches the hands of real people, and real buyers, and real individual users.
COVID-19 is an obvious culprit, forcing the manufacturers to have lower than desired output of actual hardware. The current pandemic plays a big hand but, the supply & demand & hype trends have existed for much, much longer and continue the same patterns they've had for decades.
As long as retailers only trickle out a few hundred units at a time or relatively small quantities, there is no hope for us normal consumers. Bots will continue to snap up all of that limited stock every single time. If retailers are even able to push out thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of units, there would be a much better result for regular consumers. With plentiful stock, there would be absolutely no chance for bots to be able to buy up everything as they are doing now. The deceptive profiteers behind the maddening AI bots are just not rich enough to buy up all of the units if the inventory was ranging in the high thousands.
My opinion in the last three paragraphs in my winter blog entry still remains very similar:
If I could reach out to my fellow people and shoppers out there I would say this, "Please
don't spend your hard earned money on next-generation hardware from Scalpers. Every time
one of us buys from a scalper, we just enable them to keep doing it.
Wait patiently and in a few months we will all have one from a retailer
at a fairer price".
Because of how the supply and
demand system works, there will still likely be a shortage of Next-Generation hardware well into 2021 and maybe even into 2022.
Retail online websites absolutely need to protect us consumers and change their websites and online sales systems. They need to implement a form of 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) in order to stop these auto-buying AI bots from ruining everyone else's experience. One good example of 2FA would be introducing a Captcha form somewhere during the sequence of an online transaction. Captcha images usually rely on human user input to select either an image sequence, or selecting a word from analogue cursive writing style that is not using a regular text font. Another one is MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication in which a one-time alphanumerical code is sent to the human purchaser's point of contact, whether that be a mobile phone call, mobile phone text, or an e-mail address and then that code has to be sent back to verify that they are a real valid human being that is shopping.
One interesting tactic I had heard rumors about was that one retailer was very concerned with protecting it's human buyers. So this rumored retailer implemented a massive price hike of the PS5 to add something like $2000 over the retail price, but then only offered a specifically handed out coupon to real human buyers that discounted the $2000. The positive result here would then cause these bot-using scalper type scammers to lose money if they attempted to buy up PS5 units.
Any of these can help deter AI bots and can significantly reduce the amount of non-human buyers.
No comments:
Post a Comment