Wednesday, November 18th 2020
Surprising Absolutely No One, AMD RX 6800 Series Pretty Much Out of Stock, And Scalping Becomes a Pervasive Industry Problem
The title says it all, really. We've only just been able to add AMD's latest RX 6800 and 6800 XT graphics cards to our shopping carts in multiple etailers, but the cat is already out of the bag and into scalpers' pockets. This has been a recurring event for all gaming-related tech, from DIY PC parts to the latest-gen games consoles from both Microsoft and Sony. At this point, it becomes moot to talk about availability issues, or demand issues, or reaching a conclusion between the two - the stock just isn't there for anything gaming-related, period.
Some etailers are only selling their graphics cards in-person, as a way to both control flow of stock and protect themselves from scalpers buying up the entire inventory with recourse to some digital sidekicks that automate the purchase process, and then allow them to resell anything from graphics cards from NVIDIA to AMD, passing through AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 series and the Xbox Series X and PS5 gaming consoles.
At a time where the COVID pandemic is still well underway and has actually been ever more pervasive and threatening in these winter months across the world (where winter months apply at this time of year, eh), the decision to only carry in-store inventory not only forces more people to enter possible infection scenarios, but also overturns the entire purchase process. Perhaps the time has come for etailers to actually review their online sale policies, and make things as hard as possible for scalpers to circumvent their (at times laughable) order mechanisms.
Selling only a single graphics card per purchase, not allowing the same credit card or billing information to be used for copies of the same or comparable articles, introducing captchas for every finalized cart, not allowing shipment for the same address, instituting a queue system that removes the products from stock for all but the contacted customers, and even manual filtering of orders like NVIDIA instituted on their store - these would all be sensible, partial solutions to fix this problem for the consumer, whilst simultaneously protecting customers from (I'm sorry) pretty poor choices in demanding they physically go to a store to maybe be able to get that latest gaming console or graphics card.
Of course, I guess for etailers, a sale is a sale, wherever and however it's done. They don't deal with the brand damage that surfaces from these practices, and they make their profit - as small as it sometimes is - all the same. For them, a card off the shelf is a card off the shelf, and that's that.
Source:
TechSpot
Some etailers are only selling their graphics cards in-person, as a way to both control flow of stock and protect themselves from scalpers buying up the entire inventory with recourse to some digital sidekicks that automate the purchase process, and then allow them to resell anything from graphics cards from NVIDIA to AMD, passing through AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 series and the Xbox Series X and PS5 gaming consoles.
102 Comments on Surprising Absolutely No One, AMD RX 6800 Series Pretty Much Out of Stock, And Scalping Becomes a Pervasive Industry Problem
i can finally play witcher 3 without lagging, for some reason my quad core laptop gtx 1070 just could never handle it well. other games my laptop handled just fine, but certain cpu intensive games like ghost recon wildlands, witcher 3, cpu just ran too hot.
looking forward to finally doing expansions of witcher 3 though, maxed out :D
and finally one of them stuck... lol
The title doesn't make sense.
Are there words missing?
I feel like every supply limitation is assumed to be due to scalpers and bots that consume all the stock in a split second. In reality there is almost no stock to begin with and that makes the problem seem far worse than it actually is.
AMD's chip production supply from TSMC is only a fraction of their total output, and that is further divided up into separate products for Ryzen 5000, Radeon 6000, mobile and console processors. Each product only gets a small wafer slice of supply and so the supply is scarce for a large number of products.
Of course there is huge demand, but TSMC is the donkey in a one donkey race (or something).
This already happens in some markets, like the resale of sports or concert tickets, which are now banned and illegal in most states. Or even worse, price gouging of essential supplies like hand sanitizer and N95 masks during the pandemic, which is considered a crime and can end scalpers in jail.
This affects all costumers everywhere, yea, call it whatever you want: a first world problem, FOMO, or the false pretenses of entitlement to any given goods, capitalism or whatever; truth is we should all be united against this instead of blaming AMD, Nvidia, or any company unable to meet the demand in these difficult times.
We can only vote with our wallets and not support scalpers, contact our lawmakers and try to have them pass laws against scalping of all goods, I'm not talking about the lawful sale of one costumer to another, but when a single scalper can purchase dozens of video cards or any goods in seconds and list them on ebay, that alone should paint a huge target on their back for prosecution.
Jokes aside. I think from greedia and maddia we gona see availability after christmass or should I say 2021... Hoping till then the prices will go down :). Have a small thought that I will not be able to get pc on current amd cpu gen and as well on gpu's from greedia or maddia.
Maybe even intel gpus will come out firstly, haha.
The worst thing is they had the temerity to brag it wouldn't be like Nvidia's pathetic launch.
Fact is, they had no stock.