Valve and Epic should sell graphics cards to keep them affordable
custompc.raspberrypi.orgWell PC game companies could sell graphics cards, but I don't see anything in the article that assures they land in the hand of gamers rather than eth miners.
So in that regard it won't fix the problem, frankly I'm a bit surprised that AMD/Nvidia haven't started some kind of "GPU direct" system where they track the mailing addresses they are being sent to and prioritize orders being sent to unique mailing addresses with unique credit card names. Microcenter does something similar (AFAIK) for hard to stock items where its 1 per customer, and they use the CC name to validate you don't just walk out of the store and back in an hour to buy another.
Although, like the ryzen 5k shortages it feels more like there is just a general shortage, and AMD was prioritizing the higher margin goods (aka epycs to hyperscalers). So while everyone likes to blame the miners, its just as likely that they aren't really having that big of an impact overall compared with some big corps buying some higher margin part and consuming all the available volume for their machine learning/etc apps.
How would Steam selling an AMD graphics card differ from any other retailer selling an AMD graphics card?
One advantage is that they could verify the customer is an actual active active gamer.
How exactly would they verify it? One can easily be a gamer and a scalper. If by number of games, what’s a hundred games during a steam sale compared to a $2k gpu?
If I’m running a mining operation, I can easily pay people in Asia to play video games on my account for dirt cheap to run up the time.
Account older then x years. Modern games purchased that require the GPU you are going to buy. If steam doesn't detect the GPU in your system it will ban your account etc... It's not foolproof of course but this will stop a large swath of scalpers.
This proposal reminds me of that classic copypasta, “please drink your Mountain Dew verification can to play Xbox.”
Crypto miners are not the problem, the problem is lack of competition in the GPU industry. If there was 10 companies like Nvidia everybody could get his or her GPU easily and at affordable price.
This makes no sense. Valve doesn't make chips.
Neither do most other GPU OEMs. They just get the chip and design a PCB. I'm not sure what your point is.
Dumb idea. It wouldn’t increase supply.