I remember the incredible PS2 drought, when I heard glowing report after glowing report over this GREAT WONDERFUL INCREDIBLE console (The fact that nearly all of them were absolutely hellbent on completely burying the Dreamcast…okay, it had its flaws, but it deserved a fair shake, dammit! …didn’t help.) for months before I could even sniff an actual real physical unit for sale. I think it was 11 months from the first shrieking news article to being able to take an actual machine home, and if my dad wasn’t so on the spot with store announcements, it could’ve easily been longer. But that was a case of a truly revolutionary system making demand so ridiculously astronomical that Sony simply couldn’t keep up. They wanted everyone to get in on the 64-bit wave, it’s just that units disappeared from the shelves the moment they got there.
Today, however, the industry is in a very weird place, where the creating an artificial scarcity is the objective, and if it causes players to tune out, the proper response is to hope that it doesn’t happen too much. The Switch is a prime example. We didn’t have the slightest difficulty finding a Wii or any number of accessories for it, and we would’ve easily gotten a WiiU at a great price, if, y’know, it was any good; in contrast, the Switch may as well be a damn urban legend. I can’t even remember when I’ve seen one for sale; hell, I can’t even name anyone who has one! And if you ask a Gamestop rep when they’ll actually have a PS5 or whatever that new XBox is called, you’ll probably get a sad shrug. I haven’t even seen the games announced in-store.
It’s looking more and more like PC is the way to go. Heck, I’m about 90% there.
Lot of it is COVID related. Remember the Switch was almost impossible to get for 6 months+ after the lockdowns began. And I don’t think it was just a massive run on Animal Crossing which did it. Prior to COVID lockdowns, it was easy to walk into a store and get a Switch. Then, suddenly, impossible.
People are still spending the vast majority of their time indoors. So the next gen consoles have become even more in demand. IIRC, Sony released more consoles in the first few months of PS5 than they did with PS4. But when you can’t really go out to restaurants or bars or concerts, consoles take on a greater demand. Covid protocols also have created a situation where all sales are done online. You can’t just walk into a store and pick one up if they have one on the shelf.
PC components market is also dire, especially for video cards. New current gen video cards are almost impossible to find at retail and used cards are commanding prices higher than you’ve seen for years, sometimes close to their original MSRP. Newegg is doing random drawings for a chance to buy a card and EVGA has a queue system where, if you signed up for an RTX 3080 in mid-September, you’re maybe getting close to a chance to buy one this month or the next. Word is that shortages will continue for at least another 18-24 months due to lack of chip manufacturing capacity and pent up demand.
The one half-decent way to get a GPU is through prebuilts from major manufacturers. Companies like Dell and HP can still get their hands on cards and, you might have to wait a few weeks, but at least they’re selling systems with cards in them.
Vendors for PS5 are getting them in small quantities and releasing them online. It’s a crapshoot if you can get it. Last week Walmart opened up ordering in ten minute increments. Every time I tried it was immediately unavailable. My girlfriend did it at the same time and she was somehow able to get one. It won’t be here for a few weeks but I’m going to have a PS5 soon.
Yeah I distinctly remember waiting in line to get a Nintendo Wii the Black Friday AFTER the first Black Friday launch, meaning it was a full-on year and Wiis were still trickling down to consumers. And the Black Friday wasn’t even some super deal, it was a Wii at normal MSRP it was just so rare that nobody could get one through normal means a year later still.
I remember I ended up having to get a Wii off of eBay after they’d already been out for a while. It was still hard to get my hands on one. I didn’t have to pay a fortune, I think it wasn’t too much more than retail price, but I couldn’t find one in any of the regular stores.
i remeber people that worked inj stores were getting fired for taking ps2s for themselves or taking bribes for them …
although how we acquired was well a bit backhanded…my aunt wanted to wait until Xmas and maybe when they went down a bit … well on a trip to Walmart my and my cute as a button autistic in a wheelchair nephew we got bored so we went to the electronics section and his eyes widened and he was bouncing up and down in the wheelchair so hard he almost tipped over and I was like calm down and seen what he pointed at something in the case
It was the only ps2 our Walmart had gotten that week… and the electronics manager was also the store manager and knew us well … so she says … hey I’ve been waiting a couple of days for you guys … unlocks the case and hands him the box … so of course we have to go show grandma and grandpa manager escorts us over to them (believe me he was the envy of a lot of the people we passed by ) and says “look what we found” … well grandmas eyes widened and grandpa who hated most video games was pissed …
So the idea was we were going to put it on layaway when through the whole process after prying it out of nephews hands but there was much pouting and teary eyes so grandpa who was still pissed sighed and went back in the store and paid for it outright… stomped back to us in the van and said "here take the damn thing "
and boy she got some looks every time she asked " oh hey are you enjoying /having fun with it , when we saw her
Turns out she overheard the grandparents discussing buying one before and it turned into an argument … so she decided to get one over on him…
As China Guy said, a lot of this is due to the global semiconductor shortage right now. Pure-play fab foundries like TSMC, UMC, Powerchip, SMIC, etc. are absolutely cranking up the dial to 11 and still can’t get the chips out fast enough. And consoles need chips in order to work. This isn’t going to be alleviated anytime soon.
correcting my earlier post that 12 weeks lead time has stretched out to 53 weeks.
Every gamer should pray that a typhoon makes a direct hit on Taiwan this summer. Taiwan is suffering through a drought and last year for the first time in ~50 years did not have a major typhoon landfall. Resevoirs are at 10-20% capacity. Rice farming has been suspended for the sake of the Taiwan fabs. TSMC has something like 80% of the their fab capacity in Taiwan, and when the water runs out the fabs shut down.
BTW, it takes billions of dollars and 2 years for a new fab to come on line. No quick fix.
Maybe companies will finally wise up and stop sending all their manufacturing to the lowest cost location. Spread it around, you know like something any amateur investor knows to do.
The reason many chips are made in Taiwan isn’t because Taiwan is the lowest cost manufacturer (places like India, Indonesia, Vietnam etc would be even cheaper) but because Taiwan is very entrenched in this field by now. Chipmaking is very much a steadily-winnowing-out-the-field industry by nature. The more advanced the chip (ie, the smaller the nanometer node,) the more costly and difficult it is to make them. Moore’s lesser known “Second Law” says that the cost of a fab doubles every four years. By this point it would be prohibitively expensive for any company not named Intel or SMIC to try to catch up to Samsung or TSMC. A 3nm fab costs twenty billion dollars to make. Not only that, but the expertise is hard to come by. You cannot “spread out” this sort of supply among many nations, it tends by its nature to eventually congregate in the hands of just a few. Getting 28nm or 70nm chips is one thing, but 3nm is an entirely different beast. It’s analogous to how there are only two major manufacturers of big airliners today, Boeing and Airbus.
Doesn’t change the fact that this is a completely predictable outcome. Taiwan could get whacked by a Tsunami or Earthquake, China could blockade or invade and close the ports. There’s dozens of other reasons why this centralized production is wildly dangerous.
Wow I remember the scarcity of the Wii and it was maybe the most awesome gaming system ever. Sadly it appears lazy button mashing by fatsos on the couch outweighed gamers willing to put a minimum amount of effort in playing a video game.
…didn’t help.) for months before I could even sniff an actual real physical unit for sale. I think it was 11 months from the first shrieking news article to being able to take an actual machine home, and if my dad wasn’t so on the spot with store announcements, it could’ve easily been longer. But that was a case of a truly revolutionary system making demand so ridiculously astronomical that Sony simply couldn’t keep up. They wanted everyone to get in on the 64-bit wave, it’s just that units disappeared from the shelves the moment they got there.