Nvidia & AMD
This Is Why You Should NEVER Paper Launch A Product

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Introduction

What does Nvidia, AMD and Intel all have in common; at some point they all have paper launched a product. A very basic definition for a paper launch is showing a product with great specs on paper then launching the product before enough units are available to be purchased. Paper launching isn’t limited to GPUs since many industries have had to deal with paper launches over the years. A lot goes on behind the scenes and the technology industry is more competitive than ever so typically the first company to release a new product can start racking in the cash. Tech companies also want to be seen as a “leader” in the field and never a follower behind the latest trends. AMD has been on fire with their Ryzen CPUs and in the typical Nvidia fashion, Nvidia wanted to be the first to release their latest GPU architecture to gamers and prosumers. Once again we will get a very nice reminder of why paper launches are a headache.

2020: A Year For The Ages

If 2020 wasn’t bad enough with COVID-19, worldwide shutdowns, worldwide civil unrest, shortages and manufacturing & shipping issues, Nvidia and AMD both decided to release their latest and greatest products. Oh and CDPR decided to release the broken mess of one the biggest games we’ve seen in ages, Cyberpunk 2077, but that is beside the main point of this article. AMD released their Ryzen 5000 series CPUs and Radeon 6000 series GPUs while Nvidia released their RTX 3000 series GPUs. After all of the issues in 2020 the demand for Nvidia’s and AMD’s GPUs are still unprecedented.

Even during the mining craze back in 2013-2015 which caused massive shortages I have never seen anything like this current situation. There are tons of enthusiast, gamers, scalpers and resellers trying to get their hands on the latest and greatest from AMD and Nvidia. We now have discord servers dedicated to running bots to give people the heads up on the latest available GPU stock andwe have forums or comment sections devoted solely to either make trades, buy or attempt to get GPUs. Of course we have “new” BOTS whose sole purposes is to automatically purchase as many GPUs as possible which makes things 1000 times harder for legit purchasers online. This is all within the first THREE months of the RTX 3000 release and some gamers will purchase more than one GPU which will only makes things even worse.

Resellers And Scalping

Of course when there isn’t enough supply to meet the demand scalping will be at its all-time worse. The MSRP for a RTX 3080 is $699 - $849.99 and those numbers could change as more models could be released in the future. The price range in the resell market for a RTX 3080 is $800 (if you are lucky) to $1,300+. Typically they sell around $1,000 or so. Many gamers have moved their frustration to Ebay by listing fake auctions to attempt to disrupt the scalpers pricing and bring awareness to the fact that the mew GPUs are vastly overpriced in nearly all cases. We know that the RTX 3080 is more powerful than Nvidia’s previous RTX 2080 Ti flagship, which retailed for $1,200, so these crazy prices from scalpers seems like a “steal”. Speaking of a “steal” it’s worth noting that MSI was robbed for approximately $340,000 worth of RTX 3090 graphics cards (MSRP $1,499) so it’s safe to say that even organize crime wants a piece of the GPU shortage as well.

What happens is that we are faced with an easy way for people to make money and make money very fast. The timing of these GPUs could not be at a worse time, the holidays. This scalping craze is nothing new in other industries such as the video game industry. The scalpers and re-sellers know that they can get someone who loves a product so much that they will pay over MSRP and in some cases near %50 to 100% over MSRP. This is a prime opportunity for scalpers to make a great profit. However, scalping isn’t only done by regular people and smaller companies; they are also done by large well established companies in different types of ways as I will explain later in this article (see NewEgg, Best Buy and Tiger Direct below).

Now with online shopping basically being the only way for the masses to get their hands on one of the newer GPUs it’s hard to enact the “1 product only” policy when users can have multiple accounts or family & friends to assist them. I have also read posts from several users on different websites not getting enough sleep due to attempting to purchase a graphic card or CPU. Other users have described and said things such as being depressed over the graphic cards and CPU shortages while others have described having dreams about owning Nvidia’s RTX GPU. Some of it could be sarcastic or it could be 100% serious, but whatever the case may be, gamers are all trying to get their hands on one of the biggest GPU releases we’ve seen in years.