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Yeah no. thanks.
If you're buying a graphics card to use for gaming instead of mining/scalping, it's very likely you already have a steam account.
It could also be argued that the current GFX card retailers inability/inaction to effectively combat scalping is putting more of a strain on the GFX card supply than if a portion was diverted/devoted to Steam users.
Steam has way more data on each user than major retailers that they can use to combat scalping and ensure a gamer that wants a graphics card gets a graphics card. This is as opposed to a miner trying to grab their 50th RTX 3080 for their mining rig.
edit (or a scalper only purchasing cards so they can resell it to individuals that actually want to put the card to use)
Yeah. There's a reason there's very little action because at the end of the day the scalpers are still customers. Not really a good business move to say no to someone who's making bulk orders on your stuff.
AGain. What incentive does STeam have to do this? If someone has the cash to buy, why say no. Its not like its neccessity of life.
The scalpers only a small problem rthe bigger problem are the crypto miners and yeah that's not gionna change because at the end of the day the GPU makers only make a given mount every month and they will sell these to whomever has the cash., and they can't really tell the difference between a retailer, a studio, or a school placing bulk orders. and a miner or scalper \has the incentive and money to pose as any of those.
In short. Steam will have just as hard a time locking down any supply as anyone else. In fact the extra demand will basically just make it mopre lucrative for the scalpers.
It won't help the card shortage, it will just make it worse. Also do you realize how much it would cost for shipping? Quite a bit. And no they could not just suck up the shipping costs because stores don't actually make a whole lot on video cards or any hardware really if they are selling it for near MSRP.
Means nothing, the cards are physical, not digital.
With very expensive shipping. Which they can't just suck up just because they make money on software.
After all if they were going to suck up the cost of shipping you would think they would do that with their hardware they sell now.
There is over 1 billion steam accounts, around 100 million of them are active each month, meaning most are not active.
Valve doesn't even know whos a bot and whos not, who is an adult and whos not. How do you think they will be able to tell who is a scalper and who isn't?
Linus Tech Tips has been doing a confirmed gamer thing, which they also mention is VERY resource (human) intensive. Meaning everything has to be confirmed by humans and they are not making much from it. That came right out of Linus' own mouth on the WAN show.
Easily bypassed with the thousands if not 10s of thousands of hijacked accounts a month.
And how do they know you bought a card in that time? That "insert manufacture warranty period here" means that they would have to get access to the manufactures warranty databases... something tells me none of those companies would EVER allow that to happen.
Then you have people who don't bother with those things and people who buy prebuilt systems and their warranty is though the system integrator, who will not give access to their database either.
Opens 20 virtual machines, run 20 different hijacked accounts, all using VPNs to hide their IPs and make it look like they are all different computers/people.
I now have 20 videocards I can buy, I get them sent to 20 different addresses in the area or just use companies that have a real address but forward the actual packages for a small fee to another address. All while using a website like privacy.com to make 20 unique credit card numbers.
If I can think of this stuff, scalpers can and have.
Many are holding of buying new hardware not just because of the lack of hardware to buy which your idea will not fix, but also because of the prices which are because of a number of reasons and not just because of scalpers.
And your idea won't help this any. If there are 30,000 stores all getting very low inventory of cards for any number of reasons, why do you think more will be available to sell if there was 1 more store?
Never going to happen. Again Linus from Linus Tech Tips and their verified gamer program is very labor intensive. It would cost Valve a lot of money and resources. At best LTT are doing 100 or so cards at a time. And they still sell out in seconds.
As pointed out, there are LOTS of hijacked accounts, VPNs, and VMs that can be sued to make it look like you are just a single individual looking for a video card when in fact you are a scalping company.
They have less then you think. And its easy for most of that info to be faked to make it look like its from a reason person.
LTT people are doing it, and it took them I think like 2 months or more to actually get it up and rolling and its very labor intensive and they are not making a whole lot of money from it. Everytime the doors for the verified gamer stuff opens they have a decent kind of puzzle you have to check and complete each time. Even if you pass that puzzle, If anything even looks hinky they cancel the order.
What you want is a bad idea and will not happen. I think the main reason why LTT did it, was because they have far more direct access to the hardware makers, and worked on it for months. They also had people not doing stuff because of covid so they were able to work on that idea in the background. Valve is mostly software people so still able to work on stuff from home.
As to why there is a shortage going on, lack of chips because so many things we used today use chips. Heck tesla has something like 30,000 cars sitting in the desert ready to go except for 1 minor missing part... and thats the cpu. Other car makers are the same way. TV/monitor makers are having a hard time getting chips too. (and not being able to get chips is not because of scalpers)
It was a massive hit all at once. New videocards, new CPUs, new consoles. Then toss on top of that SO many people forced to stay home, needing PCs and other computer equipment to work at home and a number of other things that all require chips. Then there was the factories around the world that had to shut down because of covid. Some of them can take months to get back up and running, all the equipment needs to be checked and the whole time they can't make stuff. Then there are the power outages that chip makers had. a 1 second dip in power or no power at all means they could be out weeks worth of stuff that was being worked on at the time, it all has to be tossed out and started from scratch AFTER all the equipment is checked.
If I remember right there was a chip factory that also had a fire.
Last I hard, just for video cards there was 30% higher demand than what they can actually produce.
There are more chip factories being worked on at the moment, but they will take years to bring online. There are 2 that I know are being looked at in Arizona, a 5nm plant and a 3nm plant. Which is great news... for 3 or 4 years from now.
Again your idea will not fix the problem, if anything it will just make it worse as it will spread out the limited supply that there already is even more.
Even if they wanted to, thats a billion dollar factory 3 or 4 or more years down the road, it also doesn't solve the chip shortage because GPU makers don't make the chips, they get them from the chip makers and they can only make them so fast.
And then the simply buy something else instead. Also VR is a very smal a nd still very niche market. And you don't need an RTX whatever to get into PC gaming. I'm doing pretty decently with a 1030.. and there are literally thousands of games I can play with that.
And as for migrating to COnsole you're assuming that people don't game on both. Lots of assumptions. M8.
Again. WHat makes you think they have a problem with it. They are paying lipservice to the idea of stopping their cards from being used for mining but lets face it. Those miners are literally their best custonmers at this point. DO you really think they mind that their cards are sellong so well that they literally can't keep up with demand? Fuurther mor it makes it more attractive to retail partners who can use the shortage of supply to gouge and increase their profit margin.
NO matter ghow you slice it, its good business.
It also benefits us as gamers as well.
Yeah Me thinks thats just lipservice meant to make gamers feel better.
Valve has no reason to. They're not selling any hardware that requires those parts. MS and SOny are selling consoles which need the parts to console. Vaklve does not. So they have no reason to invest in something like that and again. Manufacturers have a finite production capacity. One more player in that market would literally just mean less for everyone.
cuitting a sandwich in half doesn't give you two sandwiches. It just gives two people half as much sandwich.
Rep takes a backseat to profit and given that the demand has been doing wonderful things for their bottom line...
Valve would basically just obtain more expenses. They'd need to resell at scalper prices to make it worth their investment. ANMd then there's what I said. Manufacturing capacity is finite. And all Valve grabbing stock would do is basically make the supply scarcer and the prices higher all around. WHich would also make the scalping more lucrative,
As for us gamers. i dunno. I see more benefits to the shortage since it will likely push developers to designing around more moderate specs as oppiosed to the ultra high end. Which basicallymeans better games and more games for us gamers without having to invest in absurdly expensive video cards.
Scalpers and Miners will still get their hands on stuff and with Valve taking its own slice of the pie there will be fewer cards available to any obne retailer, including Valve, which will ironically just make the scalping more profitable.
Miners likewise will find ways since they have a lot of incentive.
I also don't think you understand that its not the retailers that are the ones causing the problem. The retailers are doing what they always have. The problem is simply that manufacturing cannot keep up with demand, And adding another source of demand will just amplify the problems.
The best solution to the problem would be for either nViidia or AMD to fold . Removing one of supply drains will improve the supply
Yeah you don't really seem to understand where the rpessure to use the tech is coming from.
Because there's a very loud and vocal minoprity that will whine about how your games are not making use of their uber cards. Also...Its COmpetition to sell AAA games. They push graphics because graphics are the easiest thing to market to consumers.
You can't take a screen shot of a great story, or nice gameplay.
From my perspectyive them not using the tech is a benefit to me.
Also what's your solution? [/quote]
And with what you have suggested, there is still no incentive to sell specifically to gamers.
Valve has made record profits again, selling a few hundred video cards even if that is a month to actual gamers is not going to help them any. There are 100 million active accounts a month on Steam, even if just 1% of 1% of those are actual gamers with money that want to buy video card thats still 10,000 people.
The money Valve would have to put out to actually verify that each person is an actual gamer would be more than they would make off the cards and any potential sale of games. Its almost like you think Valve will be able to get their hands on 100,000 cards or something... a number that a many hundred billion/trillian dollar company like Amazon can't get their hands on.
Guess what.... Xbox and Playstations are in very low supply too... wanna take a guess why?
Valve can't make all the VR headsets for demand already, why? Parts supply issues... can you guess what which parts? mostly chips....
A few hundred more sales at best... or people are buying the games anyway when they see them on sale.
Also just because someone buys a new PC doesn't mean they are going to buy on steam, there are lots of platforms out there right now.
It also doesn't mean a lost sale if they don't get a PC.
Xboxes and Playstations are having just as much supply issue... and its not just because of scalpers.
And there is nothing they can do when the very limited chip manufacturers can't supply enough chips for everyone.
Again TV makers can't get enough chips, car makers can't get enough chips, GPU and CPU makers can't get enough chips and so on...
Every company that makes something with a micro chip in it is having supply problems because there was a whole lot more people home, needing stuff with electronics in them and they can only make so many.
The chip makers were already at 100% output and still could not make enough.
Except that the chips that Sony and Microsoft get for their consoles are not the same chips as CPU and GPU makers use for their products. And again even the consoles are having supply issues and no not just because of scalpers.
Its supply problems all around because demand is somewhere around 30% above what they can produce.
CPUs have sold record numbers.
GPUs have sold record numbers.
Xboxes have sold record numbers.
Playstations have sold record numbers.
TVs have sold in record numbers.
Cars have sold in record numbers.
You can actually look up all this info in google.
They can't keep up with demand because they can't make enough chips. And it can take 3 or 4 years to bring a new chip factory online and thats after a year or so trying to find the right place for it.
None of those win because more cards can't be produced than they are already making. When you are already at 100% production, you can't just simply snap your fingers.
GPU/CPU makers won't see more money or rep, they are already selling them as fast as they can make them, its not like they are sitting around with hundreds of thousands of cards trying to figure out who is who. At best maybe Valve might get 1000 cards, which is 1000 less for other places. Of those thousand cards, the gamers are not going to be buying 10 thousand dollars worth of games.
Guess what, profit on computer hardware is actually razor thin. 2% or 3% at most. Usually more like 1%
So with all the extra costs to make sure its a real gamers, well they will be losing money.
Developers won't even notice a bump in sales.
A tiny fraction of gamers get what we want. A very tiny fraction.
They won't even notice, they are too busy buying cards for the thousands of other places that sell cards.
They won't notice either, because they will be selling at best 1 less card because there are literally hundreds of thousands of stores around the world that sell this stuff. 1000 or even 10,000 go to Valve, none of them would even notice.
No they won't, because these professionals use different cards which are made a different way, and are unusable to the miners so they haven't been effected.
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA Game devs strong arm multi billion/hundred billion dollar companies for a few thousand video cards.... BAAHAHAHHAHAHA
There is no solution other than to wait things out. Supply issues will last till next year so its not going away anytime soon.
The argument of "Why would I implement a technology that the majority of my user base is unable to obtain?" is a bad argument because for there to be a demand the games have to have stuff build into them that the cards can take advantage of.
When a new card is coming out game makers have the needed code to take advantage of that card months before the first cards hit the market. So times the cards are there before the games are ready, sometimes the games are ready before the cards come.
Again record numbers of computer hardware was sold. They could not keep up with demand. That was the biggest problem, though the scalpers were part of the problem too, but so was a whole lot of stuff that hit all at the same time.
That you think that people could turn to xbox/ps, when they are both in extreme shortage as well, and that retailers "contribute" to the problem shows it's needed to look up things.
You also forget that Steam is actually terrible when it comes to hardware shipping. Certainly not their strong suit.
It's not just "evil scalpers and miners". The whole electronic industry is cramped, not just GPU production.
And it's not like they bothered last bubble either, and promised themselves they'd jump on board in the next bubble. They've had nearly nine months if they had any interest. I think they've already decided, no.
Actions after all, speak louder than words.