In a move that made us go "WTF" internally, Razer has decided to test their fanbase's loyalty more so than ever before. Today, the company introduced Razer Softminer, a mining software program that is intended to be installed on computers and run to mine cryptocurrency. But instead of the users getting whatever new cryptocurrency is in fashion, Razer instead wants to retain all mined crypto and in turn "award" users with the so-called Razer Silver- loyalty reward credits, in their own words. The miner appears to be running off a version of the Gamma desktop application, as per speculation from TweakTown.

Razer Softminer utilizes heavy GPU performance loads, and there is no mention as to what the actual mining is for. It is clear, however, that the users are not mining Razer Silver (which Razer is quick to admit is not cryptocurrency) and these loyalty credits are handed out in an equivalent manner based on the mining power of the system. In their estimate, a sytem with at least a NVIDIA GTX 1050 or AMD RX 460 running the mining program for a whole day will net ~500 Razer Silver, and these can be used to "redeem Razer peripherals, digital rewards such as games, vouchers and more" from a dedicated rewards page.Razer Silver expires after 12 months from the date of earning, which makes this all the worse given the least expensive rewards include small-scale PC games at 21,000 Silver (~40 days of continuous mining for games that can be bought for $10-15 without discounts) and Razer's own products will take a lot, lot longer (over one year in some cases). This reeks of desperation for liquid cash, an unwise move in this time of low cryptocurrency interest and value, and overall little regard to their fans. Hopefully, no one ends up taking up Razer on this until we get more clarification on what the miner does for them, and even then it needs to be a lot more lucrative to interest most people.