Unfortunately, that’s the anti-scalper countermeasure. Crippling their crypto mining potential didn’t impact scalping very much, so they increased the price with the RTX 40 series. The RTX 40s were much easier to find than the RTX 30s were, so here we are for the RTX 50s. They’re already on the edge of what people will pay, so they’re less attractive to scalpers. We’ll probably see an initial wave of scalped 3090s for $3500-$4000, then it will drop off after a few months and the market will mostly have un-scalped ones with fancy coolers for $2200-$2500 from Zotac, MSI, Gigabyte, etc.
No, it’s a direct result of observing the market during those periods and seeing the lemmings beating down doors to pay 600-1000 dollars over MSRP. They realized the market is stupid and will bear the extra cost.
The existence of scalpers means demand exceeds supply. Pricing them this high is a countermeasures against scalpers…in that Nvidia wants to make the money that scalpers would have made .
Unfortunately, that’s the anti-scalper countermeasure. Crippling their crypto mining potential didn’t impact scalping very much, so they increased the price with the RTX 40 series. The RTX 40s were much easier to find than the RTX 30s were, so here we are for the RTX 50s. They’re already on the edge of what people will pay, so they’re less attractive to scalpers. We’ll probably see an initial wave of scalped 3090s for $3500-$4000, then it will drop off after a few months and the market will mostly have un-scalped ones with fancy coolers for $2200-$2500 from Zotac, MSI, Gigabyte, etc.
The switch from proof of work to proof of stake in ETH right before the 40 series launch was the primary driver of the increased availability.
No, it’s a direct result of observing the market during those periods and seeing the lemmings beating down doors to pay 600-1000 dollars over MSRP. They realized the market is stupid and will bear the extra cost.
The existence of scalpers means demand exceeds supply. Pricing them this high is a countermeasures against scalpers…in that Nvidia wants to make the money that scalpers would have made .
Not really a countermeasure, but the scalping certainly proved that there is a lot of people willing to buy their stuff at high prices.