This is out of touch; they were mad before and they will be mad again. Lots of people spend a huge chunk of their modest disposable income on high end gaming gear, and the only upside of these issues for them is that eventually, YEARS down the line, capacity/supply issues MIGHT calm down in a way that yields some benefits.
They're going to realize soon enough that they've basically just been told that the extremely shitty problem they thought they'd moved beyond is back with a vengeance and the next generation of gaming cards has the potential to make the past few rounds of scalping shit-shows look tame.
The card prices have gone up pretty significantly and availability has been bad for the last few years, they also have been segmenting their product line in ways where some of the lower tier cards are not very compelling vs previous release cycles. I don't know if that's attributable to them "forgetting about gamers" but it's what people are upset about.
I don't understand how we're multiple years into a GPU shortage from both vendors. $400 retail price cards sell for $800, presumably from scalpers.
I read breathless reviews of how the latest card performs so well even though it's just $x MSRP and the reality makes that seem ridiculous. It shouldn't take 3 or 4 years to ramp up production that much. Yes, demand has increased, but again they've had years to react to that trend. I'd like to be able to buy a mediocre card for less than $500.
You're using stupidly insulting low numbers to make a point that isn't valid. There's not like, no, cards. There's just not a lot.
Your other point about gamers not needing good/fast cards (in a follow up post) is also not super interesting to me, since all cards are at super-inflated values. Even old/used cards. For a long time RX580's were around $200. Not a blisteringly fast flagship even in it's day (spring 2017). Now they're $400.
There is for sure a supply issue here, absolutely. But with gpu miners and scalpers savaging the market, I think it's reckless beyond belief to pretend that we should just let this ride out, that we shouldn't try to help this market stay healthy.
I just cannot believe what protest there is against doing a basic good deed, trying to fight pernicious forces off.
Unfortunately, it seems they're more than happy with the current state of things and they don't particularly care who buys their cards. They can push up the price and the used market will move in lockstep because demand is so high.
In the long run, explosion in demand for GPUs will help lower prices and push the technical envelope for enveryone, including the gamers complaining in this article.
I think people should primarily be mad about AMD continuously raising prices (particularly in lockstep with nVidia), because limiting supply naturally follows from that as a consequence or side-effect.
Where is this assumption coming from that there is even a problem? Demand goes up, prices go up. Sorry you can't buy a GPU as cheap as you could a few months ago, that's life.
At one point there were major shortages and difficulty finding GPUs. It was kind of insane in that environment not to raise prices, and hand the fruits of their work to scalpers/middle men.
If people don’t want to pay inflated prices they should just not, and ultimately the problem should solve itself.
The gaming market won't evaporate. If the market can't bear the new prices, Nvidia and AMD will just lower the prices.
A real example of price gouging would be a store charging a hundred dollars for bottled water after a hurricane, because people are desperate for it and can't get it elsewhere.
The situation in the gaming market is quite different. Gaming PCs in general, and high-end GPUs in particular, are luxury items, not necessities. There are no longer any meaningful GPU shortages, and there is an enormous secondary market that people can use if they don't want to pay the new prices.
Plus, these cards are the GPU equivalent of supercars -- looking at the Steam hardware survey, the number one GPU is the affordable RTX 1650, which only recently supplanted the 1060. Is Ferrari price-gouging because their cars cost more than Toyotas?
Please take into consideration that this will be the same naive, impressionable "market segment" that repeatedly pre-orders new games, even though there is no real reason to do so, as the games are digital copies, so there is no scarcity. The same market segment also rewards shitty game companies, producing half-finished, barely working product, with their money again and again. All because of a combination of deviously good marketing and FOMO.
So yes, I fully expect those soon-to-break GPUs to sell like hotcakes, and a lot of crying soon thereafter.
The shortage is over, but the prices are still not justifiable. Why would anyone pay MSRP for how old these cards are with new product lines being announced this month?
TL;DW: GPUs are competing for chip production capacity of 2 producers, who seem to be already in stress because of generally increased demand caused by the current situation, so they can't handle demand even a tick above the previously reserved capacities.
People tend to shoot the messenger when market forces are not in their favor. Any more profit that a retailer gets from raising prices on this tiny part of their inventory could get them more than that amount of flak for raising their own prices. I think many retailers are happy moving 100% of their product at normal margins while letting scalpers take all the flak for price increases. Graphics cards are just one item of many on the shelf for most retailers.
They're going to realize soon enough that they've basically just been told that the extremely shitty problem they thought they'd moved beyond is back with a vengeance and the next generation of gaming cards has the potential to make the past few rounds of scalping shit-shows look tame.
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