Yeah I think all these companies happily selling to scalpers are not really looking at their own long-term health here. They could make efforts to sell to real customers - it would require a bit more work, but it’s not going to destroy profit margins. But if this continues for even six months I think, an awful lot of people will just but XSXes or PS5s (which may be scalped, but are a hell of a lot easier to get than 30XX chips or the like). Of the people I know trying to get those, everybody got one, and didn’t have to wait more than a month or two. Of the people I know trying to get 30XX chips since the shortage started, the only one who succeeded is a lackwit who spent way too much money on one from a scalper, and possibly me if this thing actually gets delivered tomorrow (and I’m not sure I’m not a lackwit as well!).
And people want to play new games and at high resolutions and so on. Sooner or later, trying to buy a ÂŁ400 chip that is literally impossible to get for less than about double the price, and hard to get even then, is going to look dumb next to getting a ÂŁ450 console which is merely annoying to get. And then the person is going to start investing in that ecosystem instead of PC.
If it really is sustained well into 2022 like the article suggests, and no real effort is made to prevent serious scalping, this could easily cause the same sort of PC-console shift we saw around the time of the original Xbox and PS2, which had knock-on effects for a very long time, like, most of the single-digit '00s.
