Biden made clear that this won't be an immediate fix for shortages, but should help stop similar problems in the future. The semiconductor shortage has caused major issues for the video games industry in recent months, and has been brought up by many games industry figureheads, including most recently PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan.In an interview with GQ published earlier this week, Ryan said that the semiconductor shortage was one of the main issues affecting PS5 production - with semiconductor chips in short supply, it's tricky for automobile, phone, console and PC hardware manufacturers to operate at full capacity and get their products into the hands of consumers. AMD's chips power both of the next-gen consoles and CEO Lisa Su raised similar concerns during the company's Q4 2020 earnings call, forecasting chip shortages to last throughout the first half of 2021.
With this executive order, Biden's administration is planning to assess and hopefully remedy these supply chain issues, with a focus on boosting domestic production in the US to mitigate these problems in the future. Beyond chip shortages, scalpers are also causing problems for consumers trying to pick up top-tier graphic cards and next-gen consoles. A potential console scalping ban is currently gaining momentum in the UK in light of recent market troubles. Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.