2% Chance to Win an Nvidia RTX 3000? Loot Boxes for GPUs Emerge in Japan

pcmag.com:

Ready to gamble for a new GPU? 

A merchant on Amazon Japan came up with a shady way to sell PC graphics cards by offering them as mystery boxes containing a random GPU model. 

If you luck out, you’ll win a brand new Nvidia RTX 3000 graphics card—possibly an RTX 3090, which can fetch $2,000 or more. However, most of the mystery boxes likely contain a GPU that’s over seven years old. In other words, the merchant has essentially taken the "loot box" model found in gaming and applied it to GPU sales.

The Japanese merchant,  “IGRNG,” was selling the mystery boxes for 14,000 to 15,000 yen, according to Chinese media outlet ITHome. (IGRNG is not currently taking new orders.) So buyers paid about $121 to $131 to roll the dice on the mystery boxes. 

“Enjoy the thrill of unpacking!” the Japanese merchant wrote on the Amazon listing. “This is an adventure about courage and good luck!" 

However, the chances of receiving a desirable GPU were pretty low. The merchant posted the odds, and they show customers only had a 2% chance of receiving either a new Nvidia RTX 3000 or AMD Radeon RX 6000 GPU.

Another 28% of the boxes contained older graphics cards ranging from Nvidia’s RTX 2000 series all the way down to the GTX 900 series, which originally launched in September 2014. But the vast majority of the boxes, at 70%, were packaged with an “other series” GPU, making it unclear what most customers would receive.  

If you’re hoping to return any of the GPUs, tough luck: “This is a special product, so we cannot accept returns or exchanges service,” the merchant wrote on the Amazon listing. 

The sale occurs as PC graphics cards remain hard to find at reasonable prices. So there might have been some buyers in Japan desperate enough to buy one