The WAN Show - Goodbye Discord!! - WAN Show March 26, 2021

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

Sign up for Notion for free! http://bit.ly/wanshownotion Take control of your end-of-life upgrade strategy with Extended Lifecycle Support services from CloudLinux at https://hubs.ly/H0JpBnj0 Get the CORSAIR K65 RGB Mini  On CORSAIR: https://geni.us/8fAd1Y On Amazon (PAID LINK): https://geni.us/MB1aUMO On Newegg (PAID LINK): https://geni.us/o5Zz Check out Carpool Critics, our new movie podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt-oJR5teQIjOAxCmIQvcgA Timestamps (Courtesy of BlackWings) 0:11 Intro - discord acquisition, intel tick tok, semi conducter shortage at crisis point,  acer was hit with a 50 million dollar ransom 0:55 WAN Show intro 1:22 show brought to you by notion, corsair, cloud linux 1:30 Microsoft in talks to buy discord 10 BILLION USD        5:00 Tangent into  Linus and luke playing "escape from tarkov"  24:39 Intel returning to tik tok production cycle, team blue to catch up ? 33:16 Sponsors (Corsair, Notion, CloudLinux) 36:00 GPU MSRP disaster :(            37:43 Linus talks about LMG buying GPUs at scalper prices and selling for MSRP for an upcoming video           40:13 new partner for Verified Actual Gamer Programme [EVGA]           42:10 Linus talks about in-person event in which they verify games for the programme           43:25 Poll on whether they should user scalper GPUs or EVGA ones           44:20 Games in VAGP           45:09 Result of poll           51:00 Luke talks about the since fixed error message in VAGP checkout system that happened last tuesday 54:38 LTX pins on lttstore and sticker pack 56:55 Intel tech trivia (major tech youtubers crossover event) 1:00:54 Superchats 1:02:27 A little more on VAGP 1:04:45 Conclusion 1:04:52 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, welcome to the WAN Show, ladies and gentlemen. We've got a fantastic show for y'all today. Got some great topics to talk about. Discord is apparently in talks with Microsoft to be acquired for $10 billion. In other news, Intel is apparently returning to the TikTok model. That is to say that they are going to create CPUs by dancing about them. No, no, it's a different sort of TikTok. We'll get you all the deets about that later.

What else we got, Luke? The semiconductor shortage has reached a crisis point, which I mean... That means it's hard to run. And Acer was hit with a $50 million ransom. Get it? It's hard to run and Acer was hit with a 50 million dollar ransom get it It's hard to run because you have no computer. Oh Hey, all right, we're gonna roll that intro oh we didn't get your beard fixed i really need to send ed a note about that oh gee sorry uh that's a little awkward uh the show is brought to you today by Notion, CloudLinux, or ELS, CloudLinux, yes, and Corsair. All right, why don't we jump right into our first topic? Discord. Fancy topic. Microsoft in talks to buy

Discord for $10 billion. Okay, so on the pre-show, which goes up on Floatplane and sometimes Twitch, we were having a little chit chat before we started the show about, I made a little snide remark about like, oh, what? No, imagine that, a communications platform that just wasn't making any money and it was all about user acquisition so that they could sell out. What? No way. And some viewers were saying that, hey, well, hold on a second.

Discord's actually profitable. So I did some deep and careful research and found that in mid 2020, Discord declined to specify whether they were profitable or not. And anecdotal evidence would seem to suggest that, no, Discord is probably not profitable. Luke, what can you tell me about the costs associated with developing an app and media streaming platform and how much discord charges

for their service do you like what can you tell me about the how well those things probably match up so one what some props that i will give discord um and i and i i know some people there and this is this is not why i'm giving them props i have i have pooped on many a company where I know people there in the past. So that is nothing. You have. But some props that I will give them is as far as my understanding goes, they're actually a surprisingly small team.

And they've created this monster of a product. Incredible. The team size versus what they've created is fantastic. But really high quality devs are really expensive. I am pretty sure a decent amount of the people there have some form of, I'm probably going to mix my words up here, but where they can get stock relatively easily.

Some kind of equity. Yeah, yeah. So there's some type of compensation that way, I believe. But it doesn't matter. High quality devs are expensive. compensation that way i believe um but doesn't matter high quality devs are expensive um there's also like the fact that you and i are on a video call right now um and that it's streaming is free for everybody and you might say the same thing about twitch but twitch is ran on a subscriptions model where it's many people subscribing to one person to watch that one

person's thing discord is essentially guaranteed to be few people watching one person twitch is for most of the people on the platform that are all the people on the platform that are successful it's tons of people watching one person much easier to cash all that kind of jazz so you're like okay well twitch is subsidized by bits and subscriptions and all this other kind of stuff and ads don't forget about ads lots of ads lots of ads heavy heavy ads discord is is monetized by just nitro out of everyone i know that uses discord which is actually a lot of people i'm pretty sure i know one to three people that use nitro yeah and even if they did use nitro i think we're going to go ahead and assume that these are quite heavy users and i mean you

look at the way that people use discord like for example uh when i was playing uh tarkov with you and joe and okay so um basically if you're not familiar escape from tarkov is like a super hardcore like simmy um shooter game and essentially you kind of drop into some zone and your objectives have actually nothing to do with what anyone else in that zone may or may not be doing so it's full of like npcs it's full of actual people who take over these sort of like bare bones badly kitted out npcs and then it's also got other players that are fully geared up trying to do whatever the crap is it is that they're trying to do. And what makes Tarkov super simmy and hardcore is that a lot of the niceties that you enjoy with regular video games, like say, for example, an on-screen map or anything else in

your heads-up display or pressing the reload button sort of magically taking your magazine that has five rounds left in it topping it up with another 25 rounds and all of a sudden you have a 30 round magazine and then just like what a backpack full of bullets like like this kind of instantaneous uh you know refilling of magazines and reshuffling of bullets that kind of takes place in normal games tarkov doesn't have any of that so So most importantly, one of the things that Tarkov does not have is any kind of indicator over the other players to tell you if they are friend or foe. And for me, jumping in, I basically told these guys, I was like, look, it is a matter of time before I absolutely murder one of you. So they made sure that I didn't have very good ammunition, I guess.

To be fair, you never killed Joe or myself. That's true. I've only killed Dimitri from Hardware Connects. It was not because of rivalry. It was not because of rivalry. It was an errant grenade and he really should have known to get out of the way. So that's, that's what I'm, that's what I have to say about that. Anyway,

the point is, um, well, what was my point? How did I, how on earth did I get into this? You were, you were talking about how we,

we do the discord streaming. Right? Yes. So Luke, because you guys don't have any kind of indication of who other people are or where they are. No map. Tell me, tell tell me what is it

you guys do because i thought this was pretty ingenious one of one of the tricks that you can do and honestly it it pulls your eyes away from your actual screen so it has some downsides so you don't really use it like way too often i think the upsides outweigh the downsides sir yeah there's definitely benefits to it is you stream your screen on discord everyone streams their screen on discord so you have like if we have like three or four people playing in a lobby every single person is streaming their screen so you have four simultaneous streams going and you just pop it up on a side monitor show all the different streams unfortunately for some reason it always shows your stream and you can't

make it not. But yeah you can see everyone else's streams which is pretty sweet. So basically that gives you an idea of where your teammates are and what the crap they're doing in a game that otherwise does not tell you that in any meaningful way. So you end up with all kinds of like sort of code words and location call outs like yeah hey i'm i'm i'm on the ramp that's next to the roof where i failed real hard that one time and for like someone joining the group who hasn't you know been on all of these previous exploits it's like i'm sorry what the are you talking about how am i supposed to deal with this yeah it can be pretty confusing it's mostly helpful for sherping people because you can you can like tell them like okay look to your look to your left which actually has gotten a lot better

because of compasses and also kind of junk but yeah that's a conversation for another time basically though we're not the only people that do that and there's a lot of other people that do that for other things as well. Like maybe you have a few different people in a Discord lobby. They're playing a few different games. They just want to hang out. They just hang out. They all stream their games.

Tell me. That way you can tune into your buddy's game if you want. Tell me something about live streaming costs versus VOD costs, Luke. Hit me with that knowledge bomb. Live stream is super expensive because of caching. And especially in this type of scenario where you have a few eyes on, on, on many streams,

it's yeah, you're, you're not really, there's, there's, there's, you're not really caching. So,

so for those who don't understand, like what does that mean? So, so what's the benefit of caching a live stream? Or what's the drawback of not being able to cache a live stream? So you're going to save on a huge amount of bandwidth. Because if you think about the amount of times that it has to jump, if you can send one bit of data 90% of the way,

and then just copy that and send it to the last 20 endpoints or 4,000 people. Yeah. Instead of sending all of the data entirely to 4,000 different people, if you can send it most of the way and then just replicate and send it from there, you'll save, that's a pretty rough explanation, but you'll save on a lot of bandwidth costs, which is, which is fantastic. And also turns into processing and storage costs as well because of all the jumps but so sherp in chat asks sherping um sherpa sherpa so a set like trying to teach someone the game sorry it's hard yeah so it's good it's like guiding someone through the game because if you try to go in and play a game like escape from tarkov without playing with someone who actually

knows what they're doing i mean you know what to to you in there in the chat right now that's like i could totally do it i did it it was easy it was awesome you know what good for you good job you you like you know guns and and and gun things and you're great. Wow, you're so smart. But for most people, that just ain't happening because it's very challenging and there's some really stupid, man. I could rant about Escape from Tarkov for quite some time. Remember that one time when I was trying to move an item, like a weirdly shaped item, into an inventory spot and then pick up that item

and put it into another spot that it fit better. Okay, so you can't just pick up an item on one side and then drop it onto a spot where something else is and then just be holding that item and put it down somewhere else. That functionality has been available since Diablo 1, at the very least. And for whatever reason, Escape from Tarkov makes it so that you have to like, move all the little things and then

move that over there and then pick up this thing and put it over there. It's absolutely infuriating. Anywho, we were supposed to be talking about Microsoft being in talks to buy discord right so is discord profitable we're saying probably not because video chat is basically live streaming to a single or a handful of endpoints and it's super expensive and and there's also the like extremely long-term connectedness of the voice chat like yeah voice chat isn't really that tough these days but the sheer volume of voice chat going through discord has got to be immense even even just the like picture attachments and text yeah the storage man just that the the the storage has got to be absurd it's got to be absolutely obscene and sorry did i say voice chat because I meant video chats. Like Luke and I are in a video call right now. Video chats, voice chats, text chats, live streams.

They do so much stuff. But I mean, the thing about having a lot of users is it kind of at a certain point, almost doesn't matter how much it costs to maintain them as long as you can mercilessly monetize them enough now to my knowledge discord doesn't have like a deep strategy for for monetizing its users by selling their data and integrating with other platforms if they do pay, for all I know, they could actually be profitable. But what I can say almost for certain is that their strategy is not going to be as robust as the one that someone like

Microsoft or someone like an Amazon or Google might have. So apparently, apparently, Discord might lean on a lot of peer to peer solutions. I haven't looked into it at all. I would still be very surprised if they're probable. It just like, yeah, I could be very off on the Nitro numbers, but I think there are very, very few Nitro subscribers compared to what you would expect from something like a Twitch. So some sources have stated that Discord would be more likely to go public rather than entertaining an acquisition but apparently 10 billion is enough to get microsoft a seat at the table at least they have apparently also held discussions with epic games and amazon in the

recent past epic didn't immediately respond to requests for comment and amazon declined to comment though but with more than than 100 million monthly active users, like guys, 100 million, and we're not talking 100 million, you know, signups on the platform ever. We are talking monthly active users. It's absolutely incredible. Discord has completely transformed

from like this sort of weird niche, gamery chat platform to just i mean like i mean honestly i can't think of a reason to use anything other than discord other than that i'm sort of terrified of what's going to happen to my data with discord because anything free i sort of find hard to trust and very few people do like i know some of the eve online community still uses mumble mumble is awesome i i agree but a lot of communities that are on things that aren't discord are only on those things because they were already on those things way in the past and there's been no real reason for them to move over it's very hard to justify the hassle of

setting up a mumble server when you can all just jump on discord like i'll be honest for my son and like his his friends it is so much easier for me to just be like yeah you guys just use discord like i'm what i'm supposed to navigate them all through like entering ip addresses and crap to join a mumble server like i just i can't i can't and crap to join a mumble server. Like I just, I can't, I can't. I'm sorry. Yeah.

Now, go ahead. So something interesting that I don't necessarily think is in the doc, it might be, is some of the unique things that Discord has to offer that could be really, really cool for Microsoft. One of the big sticking points for Microsoft right now, and it's like, we want people to be able to game on multiple platforms thing is that the, the Microsoft store sucks.

I don't even really have to add anything on. Nope. I think that you can make a point, but the Microsoft store just sucks. It's terrible. Nobody likes using it. Sentiment around it online is atrocious, etc. Discord has a game store built into it. Right. That could actually be pretty huge and could help them a lot.

Even if it's just trying to shift sentiment. Even if it's the same stupid broken store if they make like some improvements and then also have on discord they could they could really um they could really uh fix a lot of that sentiment and get a lot more people interested in getting games through the store um maybe if the new bethesda games that launch also launch through the microsoft discord store or new Bethesda games that launch also launch through the Microsoft Discord store or something like that, I think that could be pretty huge.

Yep. Another thing that Discord could potentially do is be like a gamer-centric communication hub that they build into Xbox. I mean, as they continue to move towards, like you said, this cross-platform kind of future, it's clear that... You know what?

It's not clear. I don't know what Microsoft is doing or has done. I don't know what kind of specific learning disability they have that makes it hard for them to build a communication platform that just kind of works in every way. Going back, they were in the lead with msn messenger and then they went through sort of like a very dark time when skype was their best offering and then what was it called like links or something what was like the it was links links was a thing yeah links and then skype became like it took over links's back end or something like that but then stayed branded

skype for business and then the regular skype one still ran on like the dog crap easily exploitable old skype back end and then teams is like man i need teams a lot of problems but teams teams is kind of garbage like i oh man man If I could just use Discord Luke if you could switch to using Discord Instead of Teams for work would you just Do it? Flowplane started on Discord Oh yeah that's true

There was a few different reasons why we switched There was actually quite a few But most of them Were for reasons that Wouldn't apply to like most situations right because you guys are on slack now right yeah yeah yeah and and like slack annoys the hell out of me too and slack has tons of problems it's just the problems that slack has for our use case are much more manageable than the problems that discord had for our use case right um but

oh geez if i was on teams i would i would move to discord in a heartbeat no question screw teams dude i hate it i know it's just so it's so unclear when someone's calling you i know i know it's like and just like notification delivery if you have multiple devices is an absolute nightmare i just i i don't know man and it just drops calls uh you got people in the chat they're like i don't think teams is that bad like all right all right fair enough hey you you enjoy you enjoy teams but one of the problems with chat programs is especially when they're for production environments like like discord is essentially for gaming if discord goes down and has a problem or whatever it's just

that's fair just go do something else use in-game in-game voice or that or i was i was saying go do something else but you could also just use something else like it doesn't really matter you just need to hear your your buddy's voice like who cares there's a bunch of different solutions for that um if your work chat goes down or has any form of issue really to be completely honest it's potentially catastrophic and those days are horrible and like luckily they don't happen that often but whenever there's whenever there's voice issues you now have to potentially find another secure medium that all your employees have it doesn't waste a ton of time to get onto it

because when you're on the clock it's like you know when you're gaming or whatever and it takes you know it's that seinfeld episode where they each one of them kind of goes and makes a phone call or uses the bathroom or whatever else and they can never actually go anywhere or do anything you know when you're gaming it's like fine it's like oh well you know what luke's not back from giving his bird a bath or whatever micromanaging thing he's doing with his budgie uh you know what let's just play around without him like you can't do that when you're on a call with like you know the municipal your local government about some zoning ordinance or something just everyone needs to be on the call it's that simple um yeah Yeah. So I, man, would you be,

would you still be completely comfortable using Discord if they were owned by Microsoft? I'm not completely comfortable using Discord in its current state if it's for business stuff. Yeah, that's fair. All right. Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. Here's another question. What is your confidence level that Microsoft wouldn't manage to destroy Discord and just run it into the ground? like eliminating, eliminating any communications platform they can possibly get their hands on. They have, what is it? Seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. They, they like, they,

they encompass that with communications platforms to, to such an amazing T like MSN messenger was actually just the most incredible thing ever. And I know I'm, I'm kind of preaching to the preacher on this one because Linus and I both love MSN Messenger. We did. They had the world with MSN Messenger. Like they did. And then they just let it go. That was actually the most confusing thing in tech. And your MSN profile page, which was like personalizable and like basically was the precursor to what would have been

a Facebook now, was just this bolted-on add-on to MSN Messenger that absolutely had the potential to be people's social media hub. It wasn't really there yet. No. If they didn't get rid of MSN and they didn't

get rid of the MSN profiles thing, they would have just killed. Someone said, what about ICQ? What about whatever? Yeah, there was a bunch of other ones. MSN was the king and MSN was going to win. Yeah. Like, it's just... Not even close.

Yeah. Like, the Gen... What are we? Millennial? What is that? X, Y? Y? Gen Y.

Gen, what are we, millennial? What is that? X, Y, Y? Gen Y. The Gen Y cohort was not interested in anything that wasn't MSN Messenger. Like ICQ was more like your Gen Xers. And they were switching. They were converting.

ICQ was dying like long before MSN got replaced. Anyway, good luck, Microsoft. Please don't ruin it um i don't think they're gonna get it you don't think they're gonna get it what i what i my hot take on this is discord is only tabling this to potentially increase their public offering value oh wow that is spicy you're probably right you're probably right. You're probably right. You know, I wish that I could invest in like initial public offerings and stuff because not because I think Discord

has an amazing potential to make money, quite frankly, but just because every single tech IPO over the last couple of years has gone absolutely bonkers right after the opening bell. Like, and guys, I am not a financial advisor this is all the the ignorant ramblings of a smooth-brained ape um but sometimes i do look at these kinds of things like the roblox one i'm just like well yeah you know it's a gaming tech ipo And what did it go up like 75% or something in the first day? It's ridiculous.

It's insane. So, I mean, if they go IPO, I would be surprised if they don't enjoy at least a degree of short-term success. Speaking of a degree of short-term success, Intel is planning for long-term success here. I am so excited about everything that Pat Gelsinger is announcing for the company. I think the stock has actually slipped a little bit

since after this announcement because investors don't care about the long-term, but this is the kind of long-term thinking that we need so some of it seems a little optimistic starting with that intel will be returning to the tiktok product development cycle that was their bread and butter back in the day so a tick man i can't remember which one is which doesn't matter but a tick and a talk are basically a process node advancement. I'm pretty sure a tick is a new process node advancement. New process? Okay.

And then a talk then would be an architecture change. And the reason that you tick and then you talk is that if you try to do both at the same time, then you just dance. Okay, sorry. It's that if you try to do both at the same time, then you just dance. Okay, sorry. It's that if you try to do both at the same time, it's extremely risky. Every time you shrink your transistors

or I mean, shrink your lithography, every time you shrink the CPU, what you risk is like, oh no, there's like an electron migration, quantum tunneling crap that we didn't see coming from our previous nonsense. We got to solve all these problems now. Oh no. Ah, and every time you change your architecture, of course, you're, I mean, you're re-kajiggering the way that your entire CPU works. Of course, there's a lot of problems that you're going to need to solve. So the idea behind TikTok

is that you are only tackling one set of those problems at a time. And it gives you smaller gains overall with your new CPU, but it gives you hopefully a predictable amount of hassle with each new refresh. So just to be super clear a tick is a new fabrication process and a talk is a new micro architecture as i believe we just said i just

verified it yep yep looks like we've got it right here so i think it's pretty optimistic with that said i mean you know what i say you know hey i don't know if you guys are going to pull this off, but the reality of it is like TSMC has been rolling new process nodes just you know a yearly tick tock cadence um it's got to be better than what they're doing now because like we're currently on this cycle okay so remember a tick is process and a talk is architecture so fifth gen broadwell was process. All right. On 14 nanometer. Then we had sixth gen Skylake. That was a new architecture. Then we had seventh gen Kaby Lake, which was optimization. Eighth gen Coffee Lake, which was more optimization.

We had ninth gen also Coffee Lake. That was a refresh. Tenth gen Comet Lake. That was optimization. We had one, three four five they shouldn't be allowed to call those five generations of cpu like what does a generation even mean anymore and then finally with 11th gen rocket lake although we are still stuck on 14 nanometer we finally got a new architecture and we got some real performance gains out of

rocket lake now it has problems it runs hot but yeah just a little bit just a little bit but you know what luke okay you can't ride a rocket without getting a little close to the sun closer to the sun the the atmosphere doesn't block the rays. It gets hot. What if you went the other way? You'd eventually reach another sun. Okay. Yes. Not really.

Success. I win. On top of this commitment to go back to TikTok, Mr. Gelsinger announced that Intel will be investing $20 billion. That is with a B in two new chip- making plants to be added to its Arizona campus. So we are expecting from these over 3000 permanent high tech, high wage jobs, over 3000 construction jobs and approximately 15,000 local longterm jobs.

That is freaking awesome. Mind you, um, until the new fabs come online until we'll be taking a long time. Yeah, 18,000 local long-term jobs. That is freaking awesome. Mind you, until the new fabs come online, Intel will be- That'll take a long time. Yeah, it'll be a- That'll take a long time to build properly. They take a long time to vet. Like it's gonna be a while.

It'll be a spicy minute. So they'll be using third-party fabs more openly starting in 2023. With that said, my understanding from what TSMC has said publicly about Intel's commitment to use third-party fabs is you'd be our lowest priority. Thanks. Not only because you have your own fabs that you mostly use, therefore you're not really a strategic partner, but because you also, at the same time as announcing that you're going to use our fabs somehow magically,

are announcing that you are going to become a competitor because Intel will apparently be building up this new capacity and then be offering their own fabrication services to the same customers that might otherwise go to TSMC or to Samsung. TSMC or to Samsung. So yeah. In other news though, Intel's own 7 nanometer process efforts are apparently progressing well, which these new fabs should help with once they are ready. And it should be noted that Intel's 7 nanometer is not the same as TSMC's 7 nanometer, which is actually closer to Intel's delay-plagued 10 nanometer. We did a whole tech quickie on this, and it was shocking how many people were super mad about facts in that video, and how many people have sort of fallen for the branding that other fabs have used around their manufacturing processes. Intel

is behind. Their 10 nanometer has been too late. Normally, we're in a position of being ahead of everyone else. What you're looking at right now is actually branding of a technologically not really the apples to apples manufacturing process. So when you take someone else's 7 nanometer and Intel's 7 nanometer, the actual transistor density is probably not as good, whether it's TSMC or Samsung. Now, that's the conventional wisdom of course. We're going to have to see how much Intel manages to shrink their 10 nanometer transistors when they move to 7 nanometer. I don't think that they've talked about it publicly yet at all but we'll

keep an eye on that and hopefully things will go freaking awesome because guys whether it's amd who's behind or intel who's behind we should always be rooting for the underdog to catch up because that'll put pressure on the leader and i am freaking jazzed to see an intel that is like for serious actually for realsies investing in building better processors uh the the discord topic was probably a lot more eye grabby and that's the reason why it got the title and whatnot this topic is very deeply exciting though yeah this is good we we've seen intel sit on their laurels for a long time and we've been complaining about it for a long time so it's probably the right thing for us to do to give them props for not sitting on their laurels.

And this seems like that. So I am stoked. This is fantastic. Very cool. It's not just cool because like, oh goodness, we might actually have Intel processors that people wanna buy. So they might actually move, which is a good thing.

But also, I mean, if you wanna look at it at a completely non-tech standpoint, 15,000 local long-term jobs, that alone, pretty cool. Yep. Right? Like, sounds good. Intel building fabs in the States. Cool.

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Our next topic is good luck playing close to MSRP for a used GPU. This is extremely frustrating. I mean, man, check this out. This is an eBay link to sold listings for GTX 1070s and 1070TIs. Luke, 1070s are still going for $140 to $180. And that's on the low end. Here's a 1070 that sold today for $530. Imagine two generations old, not top of the line going for that much like actually nuts not that it's a bad card like 1070s are still quite capable cards which is exactly why people are glomming onto them yes for sure i'm not trying to dig on on 1070s but like for over 500 bucks like oh it is really brutal so this uh

this topic was done up by one of our new writers who's not off probation yet Whether it's miners silicon shortages or just PC building popularity or more likely some combination of all three It is pretty much impossible to get any decent graphics card for MSRP 1066 gig is going for 300 US dollars with eBay listings250 to $400. That's what they're selling for. Used cards typically 20% under MSRP in normal times, let alone cards from 2016. They should be so much less. And if you want something in the 20 or 30 series, good luck finding them for less than nearly double MSRP. So the reasonolas has been researching this is because he's actually working on a video that we're going to be doing where we are going to buy cards um at scalper prices and then we are going to make them

available to verified actual gamers at msrp so we are we're we're going a step farther luke we're going we're going beyond okay so i know it started okay verified actual gamer program started with us buying cards from manufacturers but we're stepping it up we are actually going to go find cards that accidentally or maybe on purpose got into the hands of scalpers and we're going to get them back to gamers now wow i can't promise that we're going to get them back to gamers now wow i can't promise that we're going to do too many of them that way because it really is a lot more cost effective for me to just buy them from manufacturers but there's also some feedback already coming in from people saying to not fund the scalpers but what do you guys want me to do do you want gamers

to have them at msrp or not i think that's the? I think they just want more cards directly through verified actual gamer program from the manufacturers, but I don't know. Well, we're working on that too. So guys, if you want more cards in the verified actual gamer program, what you have to do is you have to make your voice heard. You've got to let GPU makers know. You've

got to let guys like Asus and EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, you've got to let these guys know. Zotac, hey, we want to see you guys support the Verified Actual Gamer program because we trust Linus Tech Tips to actually deliver these things into the hands of gamers and we don't trust whoever else it is. Because honestly, I can tell you now, if your trust is shaken in the traditional supply chain, I share your sentiment. We uncovered, and I really don't want to name any names because I don't need that drama in my life, but we uncovered a situation around a recent GPU launch

where manufacturers were telling us one thing about the supply and places where that supply was supposed to be was telling us other things. And so we do not believe that all the cards that were supposed to end up on shelves actually made it to shelves. But you have my personal pinky swear that every single card that comes to us from

a manufacturer that we buy will go out for MSRP and no more. We actually have a really exciting announcement. I'm probably jumping the gun on this a little bit, but these guys seem jazzed to engage with us. So I think the odds are that they're going to go forward with it. It looks like EVGA is probably going to be our next partner for the Verified Actual Gamer program. So guys, be excited because you guys know EVGA is huge when it comes to GeForce. So I'm really, really excited about that. And what I want to say about EVGA is

even if they don't manage to make it happen, even if they can't dig up some cards for us they get it like not everyone just like immediately understands what we're trying to do here but like jacob over there freaking that guy gets it i barely even had to explain it i'm just like yeah we built and actually like bought nothing is proof but we built a really really well defended checkout system that really does give a huge advantage to actual gamers and no advantage to people who have you know bots or scalper groups or whatever else and he was like dang i'm in and i'm like wow that's awesome so he's trying real hard and we're really excited to work with them. But just because we've already done a drop,

like say with Asus, for example, still feel free, let those guys know that you want to see more of these drops because the more cards we have, the longer they will last and the better chance that our regular viewers, especially you guys, will be able to get their hands on them.

There's a pretty notable amount of feedback of people saying not to buy from scalpers. I think maybe, maybe that will mean something I'm trying to pass that feedback on, but also I would reiterate on what line has said is if you're, if you're fighting with that sentiment, try to help us get some, some more manufacturers on board. Spread some good sentiment so that we can get more stuff through the program. Through the program is better.

I mean, if you guys want, maybe what we could do is... You know what? I'm just going to tell you guys now. The concept for the video is a really fun one. I'm really excited about it. We are going to do an in-person event, which is going to be a little bit challenging in covid times it'll have to be like outdoors or something like that but we are planning an in-person event where we're going to verify that people are actual gamers by having them game against me or other members of the lmg team and the way that i intend to run it is if you even like can demonstrate that you're a gamer.

Okay. So you don't walk up and play a shooter game and put your fingers on the arrow keys. Maybe you don't beat Ed and CS right away. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like as long as you're a gamer. Okay. MSRP, no problem.

Okay. But if you start winning, well, hey, now the price might go down. Oh. Yeah. So we're going to have some real fun with that event so the intention was actually for us to buy the scalper gpus and then sell them at msrp or even for less depending on how gamer you were um but what we could also do is we could just take some from the evga drop and we could use those to support the

in-person event if you guys really don't want to see that i just take a poll should we get a poll yeah we could get we could get a straw poll going i mean because it could be the loud few right i could be taking the wrong sentiment from the crowd right now um maybe people are totally down with with pulling from scalpers. Yeah. Do you want me to make it? I got it already. I got it. Okay.

Okay. I've created the poll and I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to drop that and float plane chat first here real quick. Okay. Float plane chat. You guys are ready to go. And I mentioned a shooter. I said Counter-Strike, but I don't believe the idea was exclusively shooters.

Right after I said Counter-Strike, a bunch of people in the chat were like oh what if i don't play shooters so my intention would be to offer people a few different options and my intention would also be to make it extremely challenging um so the kinds of games that i was going to offer people the opportunity to beat me at would be things like Halo 1, Beat Saber and I think there was there was something else that I had in mind probably something like Super Mario Super Mario World 3 the like battle thing so these are all things that I am like legitimately actually fairly good at so yeah we've got people saying Beat beat saber let's go you know what good luck it's possible actually really good it's possible you're better than me it is unlikely

i legit have hundreds of hours in beat saber um and just just as a reminder he didn't say that you had to win you just had to prove that you're a gamer that's right exactly those are different things well it looks like the community has kind of spoken here should we liberate scalped gpus 71 of you say no man i would have thought people would have been jazzed about this here i am trying to like it goes to show maybe i just don't even know what i'm doing and i should quit because here i am i'm making gold xbox controllers and nobody gives a shit i'm like hey let's buy let's like use my

own money to buy scalped gpus and like make them available to the community for less than msrp woo go linus and it's like no linus don't do that i hate it i hate it it. I think the idea here is to take Robin Hood's kind of thing. Sure. You're buying from the rich to give to the poor. So I should steal them. Instead of taking from the rich. And a way to sort of maybe do that is to acquire more gpus directly from manufacturers so they don't filter their way through uh shady back channels directly to scalpers or to miners or whatever okay you can

get them and hand them directly you're bypassing all of the the bad okay i mean that is that is that is fair i mean the reality of it is though that there's going to be a limit to how many that i can get my hands on and honestly one of the things i was a little concerned about with verified actual gamer program is like don't get me wrong guys like we are still making money on those gpus and i i'm not i'm legitimately not it's not good for me to sell them below the MSRP because what that does is it undermines the hardworking people who are trying to make a living selling computer hardware, like computer stores, you know, like that's actually, it's bad for the industry for me to, for me to undercut people. So it really is an MSRP. So I am, it's not a ton of money,

quite frankly, the margins are not great, but, but I am actually making traditionally not very good money on it. So this was a way for me to try to kind of say like, Hey guys, look, verified actual gamer program, like really isn't about, I am making money, but it's not about making money. So I was like, okay, I'm going to like, I'm going to blow some of that money on these scalped ones as a way of sort of giving back as well but if people don't want it it's like yeah I mean don't get me wrong Linus Media Group Incorporated we're a business we're we're down to make money so I think I think the video concept personally I'm just gonna interject here I think the video concept is fantastic

I think you can still totally do it um hopefully purchase GPS yeah Hopefully we can get more manufacturers on board. Hopefully we can get more product. And then it takes away from the online launches less. And then you can still do the video concept because that's a really, I mean, I would watch that. That sounds cool. I like Battle Royale for being able to have gaming. It's kind of brutal, but really cool at the same time.

That's something that like, if I was currently in the market for a GPU and I was struggling to get one and I heard this event was going on, oh, I'd be there in a heartbeat. I know you'd be there. At the very least, you literally already said you don't have to win.

You just get a better deal if you do win. There's no way I'm going to show up to an event and not appear like a gamer you know what i mean and that's probably true for for a lot of people in the audience like yeah you might not beat linus in in beat saber but if you can show that you know kind of what you're doing with a vr headset you understand how stuff works and you understand basic gaming uh flow and stuff like that yeah just like or even if you just demonstrate that you've like played a rhythm game before. You know what's up.

Yeah, yeah. You know what you're supposed to... Some block is flying at you and you get it. Like, that's... Yeah. You understand what you're supposed to do at the very least.

So, yeah. You know what? Guys, if you want to see more cards in the Verified Actual Gamer program, apparently me personally buying them from scalpers is not the answer so you know we in that case we need more cards for manufacturers i just want to take a moment to shout out the guys that have supported the verified actual gamer program so far asus was

in first msi was shortly behind like they were they were right into it. So credit to both of those guys. Because guys, this is a really unconventional thing and it's very disruptive to the regular supply chain. So those guys went out on a limb to support this program and massive props to AMD as well. AMD, I think, is the one so far that has gone way above and beyond in terms of their support. When we have our AMD drops, expect to see some serious stock of Ryzen 5900X and of Radeon 6800XTs. Like, we are really, really excited about those drops. So those guys were in first.

And then it's actually, I don't want that to take anything away from EVGA. I didn't approach EVGA yet until like two days ago because we wanted to see the i mean honestly even having three partners lined up before we did a single drop no offense luke but i was terrified oh yeah no i suppose it's fine because if for whatever reason, if for whatever reason the technology didn't work, we were going to look like complete a**holes, right? So now that we've had one really successful drop, other than that error message that kind of didn't go away,

which we have fixed now, now that we have got a successful drop, man, the Verified Actual Gamer program is open for business. So huge shout out to AsUS, MSI, AMD, and to EVGA so far for recognizing what we're doing, recognizing that it's important, and putting their money where their mouth is and supporting the program. Yeah, and maybe I can give some back-end baseball. I don't think that's how can give some, um, back end baseball. That's, I don't think that's how that phrase works. Inside baseball. I can explain a little bit about, yeah. Back end. That's why I thought, okay. Um, what was kind of going on there was we, we tried to build this, we, we essentially, we didn't want any of these cards to be remaining when we were done. Right.

And there was a reality and I'm pretty sure this actually did happen, where some people didn't even want to buy the card. But they ended up on this video, and they ended up on that part of the video. And they're like, what's this? And they wanted to check it out. And then they see this quiz. And they're like, I'm a gamer. And they want to go through the quiz. And they finish the quiz. They're like, Oh, wait, I don't want to buy a card. So we wanted a system where if someone didn't buy the card that they just got the chance to buy, it would release that card back to the next most recent person who had successfully completed the quiz.

The gamer gauntlet. Yes. Because it won't always necessarily be a quiz. Fair. True. Interesting. Letting people know. But yeah, yeah. So there was essentially a queuing system so we can make sure that all the graphics cards went. We also were manually approving every single purchase so that we could have a,

that's just another layer of trying to make sure that these are getting the cards into the hands of the right people. Hey, Luke, give yourself credit. It was not trying to make sure. We made sure. We made sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That simple. Okay, yeah.

And there was some conflict there where we didn't quite get the right use case and it ended up not properly flagging. So because things were not, the payment for things wasn't manually captured yet it wasn't like 100 i'm gonna say this wrong and and will's gonna will and you're gonna get mad at me but um it it uh it because it wasn't manually captured yet the inventory wasn't processed in the way that we were kind of expecting yeah so it was sitting there waiting and verifying your quiz and not telling you that you were waiting in queue.

But you were either waiting in queue or there was also no inventory left. The good news, I got to that screen. There was no inventory left. The good news is that the queuing system worked properly. Yeah, yeah. It was just the communication around the queuing system that did not work properly because the back end has three states for inventory. In stock, not in stock, and maybe in stock. And what we didn't account for was that maybe no man's land and how we were manually verifying the orders on the back end and how that would interact so it wasn't giving the error message correctly.

So we're learning a lot. Like, guys, you know what? I mean, there's websites dedicated to doing these kinds of drops of limited edition items that have been around for years and years. And we're just kind of jumping into it because we felt like we had to. Someone said, so I did bleep up reloading from that Verify. No, actually, you were fine. This was the thing.

It all actually worked. It just didn't appear proper for like a few different reasons. But if you refreshed and then it was like, oh, there's none left. There was none left and you needed to refresh for the site to tell you that properly yeah but that was the actual result that is what you got um it just yeah it required a refresh to like update you properly yeah um in other ltt store news if you go to lttstore.com slash products slash ltx pins uh do you remember those pins that we did for ltx um 2019 yeah definitely okay we have 16 sets of them left

they're super cool basically they are pins of who was on our roster at the time so um now we actually have a lot more people than this but in no particular order we've got uh oh man i'm i'm gonna i'm probably gonna struggle with this a little bit but i'm gonna try i believe this is andy anthony jake uh matthias tyler that's, yeah, Tyler was with us at the time. Taryn, James, Riley, Yvonne, Dennis, Jono, Colton, me, Lloyd, David, Nick, Light, Edsel, John Martin, so that's our tech quickie writer, Janice, Brandon, David, wait, did I say two Davids? Oh, crap, Alex, Alex, that's David. That's Alex. And then... Oh, shoot. Who is this? I don't remember, but I'm pretty sure that's Pella and that's Alex P. A-prime. Shoot. Who is this? I feel terrible. Okay. Well, I tried. Anyway, we have just a handful of them left. They were supposed to be exclusively sold

at the event, but we didn't get them together in time. So we have, the reason we have a weird number left is because we made them available first to VIPs from the event, then to like two day pass holders, then to then, then, then, then, then. So most of these went to people who are at the event. We figured, you know what the hay, then. So most of these went to people who are at the event. We figured, you know what, hey, rather than throw them in the garbage, we might as well make them available to some of you WAN show viewers. Right. Oh, and there's another announcement for the store. We have a new sticker pack.

So any order that you place is going to come with the new sticker pack now. So that's pretty cool. What else we got? Luke, is there anything else kind of interesting? Let's see. I was just screenshotting some very good verified gamer. While you're looking, I have something. Intel Tech Trivia answered in the form of a question. That is the formal name of the game show that we are going to be

live streaming exclusively on floatplane on march 31st that's right it is coming up so this is our tech spin on the popular game show format um i don't ah should i just admit yeah okay it's a rip-off um our guests are going to be ufD Tech, Bitwit, Paul's Hardware, iJustine, Snazzy Labs, and MKBHD. That is a star-studded guest list if I have ever freaking seen one, and I am really excited. The format is going to be a winner moves on,

losers are eliminated format. It's going to be raw and uncut for floatplane, by the way, and we are expecting the live stream to be as long as eight hours. The goal is to start at 10.30 a.m. Pacific time on March 31st, and there's going to be three games with two rounds each. So game one is UFD Tech, Bitwit, and Paul's Hardware. So the goal is to have it be a little bit more pc it oriented game two is going to be i justine snazzy labs and mkbhd so the goal is to have it be a

little bit more mobile and apple oriented so we kind of have like themed pools of contestants and game three will be the winners from games one and two, plus a secret guest. A secret guest. Oh, okay. I see in the notes. Yeah, there was no way I wasn't going to tell the people. Okay, it says right here, the guest is supposed to be a secret surprise,

but Linus is really bad at keeping secrets on the WAN show. So it's Linus. So I will take on the winners. Luke, you're muted. I will take on the winners from games one and two. If you don't catch it live on floatplane, it will be edited and released to YouTube sometime in April, the exact date TBD, but these kinds of live events can take a long time to edit down for YouTube. What I was going gonna say is if someone

wants to add something to the doc in the future that they don't want linus to spoil for one don't put it in the doc well i would have said it anyway because i knew that i'm gonna be the the the third contestant for the third game to put the don't say this first probably a good idea um so someone came up with a pretty interesting idea for for that that video by the way um where they'd have to bring their old gpus and then you would take their old gpus for them and potentially flip them um sorry what yeah maybe maybe if someone's gpu is old enough that's kind of useless uh but the the comment was essentially saying like oh if someone wanted like a 3080 they could bring in their current like 1060 like a trade-in program yeah and get like a discount on the already msrp priced graphics card and then you guys could then flip

those old graphics cards at a reasonable price oh man that sounds that sounds like an accounting nightmare i'm so sorry really cool when it was in text and then right when i said it out loud i was like oh there's a lot of problems with this yeah i'm sorry i can't do it by the way sticker packs are apparently going to start shipping out early next week. They are apparently not in the warehouse just yet. So that's really good for you guys to know right now. Okay. I honestly don't really see anything else that looks like a big important topic. So I think we're just going to do a few super chats and call it good for the day, you guys.

Yeah, guys. Yeah, I think I mentioned the semiconductor crisis point thing and i think i mentioned the acer hit with a 50 million dollar ransom if we want to try to fire through those oh this is really frustrating my super chats are not under the viewer activity tab so there's one that's like 50 that's not even in there steve figueroa says for my cartoon aficionado. Oh, thanks, Steve. And one from Brandon McKelvey.

First Super Chat ever. I've watched you guys for years. When was the first verified actual gamer drop? It was this Tuesday? This Tuesday. And we pulled it out of the video after because we didn't want people to be confused for years to come

by this dead link to the store because obviously we were only able to keep them in stock for about 20 25 minutes so um yeah i'm so sorry guys but i i don't i don't have the super chats um if you guys can still recall them maybe just recall them and um hopefully you can get a refund on them because i i don't have any way of reading them you guys i'm sorry um qwerty asks will floatplane get an uncut vod of the of the um tech trivia answered in the form of a question i don't see why not yeah yeah let's do it so if you guys are into that make sure you get subscribed over on floatplane tiki asks what's the site for verified actual gamer program and how do we enter you need to make sure that you are watching linus tech tips videos get the get that bell rung make sure you are watching the videos as soon as possible if you're in the discord there is a discord bot that will notify you when a video goes live for example that's a

good way to make sure so here's a question do you even want to tell people if we have we have a bunch of verified actual gamer drops lined up yeah you even want to tell people when they're coming no yeah i didn't think so because i mean for like, part of the Verified Actual Gamer program is that this is me taking care of my own. Like, if you are one of those dedicated viewers that is right there on that bell notification and watching the videos right when they drop, then I want you to have the best possible chance to get a GPU. It's that simple. Yeah, I mean, sorry. Makes sense though, yeah.

Yeah, yep. So make sure you guys are watching the videos. Make sure you're watching the whole thing because we're going to have, we've got some pretty fun ideas for how to make it harder to cheat and harder to just kind of jump right to the page without actually watching the video. So it's going to be fun. Anthony asks me, what about people working slash at school during

the drop? There's not a ton that we can do about that, but we will consider doing some of them at different times of day because it's more than just working and at school. There's also different time zones to consider. So I would be quite surprised if we don't see some of them happen with videos that are not at our normal time. All right. All right. Thanks, Saturn Tubes. an autograph on the gpu or something oh yeah it's really hard for us to manage it's enough that we're just kind of like bringing these things in and getting them out in a timely manner there was that maybe not for this but there was that idea that you came up with do you remember no i don't remember the signature edition thing uh i don't remember

the details of that i'll i'll oh that mechanism yeah i don't feel like dealing with that right now we've got enough no i definitely not for this i'm just saying like it's it's a potential thing that could maybe work eventually yeah okay yeah yeah right now no no not at all all right so that's it for the land show we will see you guys again next week same bad time same bad channel bye let me know when we're offline i will i remember it now though yeah no not that there's an idea of someone posting a chat that i actually adore um and we are cut on youtube