In a surprise move that nobody saw coming, scalpers yet again used bots to clean out day-1 stocks of a brand new graphics card – this time it was Nvidia’s $1500 RTX 3090… Due to more limited stock RTX 3090 seems to have sold out faster than the RTX 3080 did.
Unsurprisingly, the bulk of those 24GB behemoths have already made their way directly to eBay where they’re currently being sold for anywhere from $1000 over MSRP to $10000+. Some have even resorted to selling (and buying) paper cutouts of the illusive RTX 3090.
Similar to the RTX 3080 debacle, prospective purchasers of the RTX 3090 have mentioned watching product pages transition from “coming soon” directly to “out of stock”.
While this doesn’t paint a good picture for future releases – like AMD’s RX 6000-series which is coming in October – it does provide other companies an opportunity to fix the problem prior to their releases. However, at the end of the day, if all of the cards sell then it’s a win regardless, and as such there might not be any vested interest in actually addressing this.
What we can say for sure is, don’t buy these excessively overpriced cards from these unscrupulous scalpers. The only reason they’re able to clean out day-1 stocks is due to people’s willingness to buy for inflated prices. If that stopped or slowed down to the point where it became unfeasible, the scalping would quickly follow suit.
At the end of the day, paper launches like this have always been less-than-ideal, and they always will be. Regardless if scalpers are out in force employing a bot army to snap up all the stock, individual gamers would have done the same thing – it just would have taken a couple more hours to happen.
