Thursday, December 10th 2020
It's a Scalping Christmas: Scalpers of Latest Games Consoles, PC Hardware Rake In ~$39 million
Michael Driscoll, an Oracle data engineer, has written a data scraper that runs through eBay listings for the latest hardware, comparing products with their sale price. The objective was to see just how pervasive scalping actually is, and to get a (flawed and incomplete, but still extremely interesting) outlook at the scalping ecosystem and their gains with the current hardware and console shortages. Driscoll analyzed sales for the Xbox Series X|S, the PS5 (discless and disc-based) as well as NVIDIA's RTX 30-series, AMD's RX 6000 series, and Zen 3 processors. There are some assumptions on the gathering and analysis of this data, but that is part of the beast.
The results are potentially desperation-inducing. AMD's Zen 3 CPUs have sold for sometimes 240% of their MSRP (looking at the biggest offender, the Ryzen 9 5950X. The RX 6800 XT graphics card has been selling for within an inch of 200% of its MSRP as well, with a median price over the past week set at $1247 (compare that to the $649 MSRP). The RTX 3080 has been selling at 180% of its MSRP for the past week, but it has been moved at 220% of its MSRP before. The case repeats with several degrees of severity for the Xbox family and PS5 consoles.
All in all, scalpers have already made an estimated $89 million in sales, with an estimated $39 million in profits from reselling these pieces of hardware. eBay and Paypal have each taken an estimated $6.6 million and $2.4 million, respectively, from fees over these sales. Of course, this data only looks at eBay, and not any of the other scalper-ridden marketplaces and selling venues, so this is only a partial outlook at this pervasive problem.
One can hope that this will come to an end and that people will actually look beyond greed, but that's likely just wishful thinking. I think it's fair to say, and to expect, that this scalping phenomenon will keep happening in future hardware releases, now that some greedy individuals already have the tools and the profits to encourage them towards this behavior. All hardware launches have limited initial availability; and hence, all of those will be the scalpers' paradise, provided there are enough of them keeping up with these activities to drain retailers of stock.
Source:
User Michael Driscoll @ dev.to
The results are potentially desperation-inducing. AMD's Zen 3 CPUs have sold for sometimes 240% of their MSRP (looking at the biggest offender, the Ryzen 9 5950X. The RX 6800 XT graphics card has been selling for within an inch of 200% of its MSRP as well, with a median price over the past week set at $1247 (compare that to the $649 MSRP). The RTX 3080 has been selling at 180% of its MSRP for the past week, but it has been moved at 220% of its MSRP before. The case repeats with several degrees of severity for the Xbox family and PS5 consoles.
61 Comments on It's a Scalping Christmas: Scalpers of Latest Games Consoles, PC Hardware Rake In ~$39 million
Everything else is available, not in huge quantities, but in enough supply to meet demand.
Ended up buying and shipping a Ryzen 7 5800X and an Nvidia card here and send it to a make in the UK so he could build his new rig.
He's even had a hard time finding a case and PSU that he wants that's in stock. His first, second and third choices weren't available.
A couple of those models have 5+ in stock.
Yellow buttons mean it'll take more than 24h to get them.
The currency is NT$.
people where ok with buying $1,200 RTX 2080 TI's when it's MSRP price was what $999
Now they want to complain about it during a world wide a pandemic. After production was stopped for a few months. Now you got Scalpers making money of people having F.O.M.O and just being Impatient.
All you have to do wait three months and not buy anything, stock volume will pick up by then.
I say let all those GPU's and CPU sit on The shelfs a while.
That's no scalper, regular retail store - mediaexpert.pl
From Nvidia's site:
Now we're definitely in the 3080 territory.
Speaking of 3080...
But wait, it gets better:
Proline.pl
So it's not only scalpers Christmas.
We are creating our own madness here.
I'm slowly saving up money for a new entry mid range-ish card for months now and its fine,I can still play bunch of games with the current aging one. 'Don't have to always play the newest games anyway'
In my country there are some cards in stock but the pricing is crazy, same on the second hand market and from what I see ppl actually buy them.:wtf:
3060 Ti is between ~650-830$, 3070 ~1000-1200$, 3080 ~ 1300-1700$ and the 3090 is like 2500$.
For some reason the prev gen cards are also harder to find lately, stuff like 5600 XT and the 5700. 'thats the range I'm personally interested in'
in my country the price are already enough jacked up from the fabled unicorn that the MSRP is ... and that's at the local retailer/etailer .... i bet i will have to wait a long time till they have what i want in stock (thanks to scalpers and their buying customers) and at a correct price (aka ~25% more than what other pay for it ... yeah yeah i know Switzerland peoples have to pay more because they have a higher income and buying power than the others ... well, not me ... some need a leasing for a car ... me for computer parts :laugh: not really complaining tho ... it works)
I'll continue to wait. I don't have a game my 980Ti can't play and my i5-4670K does just fine running at 4.4GHz. I figure by March or April things should smooth out a lot and that's when I'll have a new build.
That would involve a bit of planning, but so the scalpers would buy stuff wich could be nearly worthless one or two weeks later.
So if a manufacturer would buffer 3x the supply for the first few weeks but trick the scalpers with faked low preorder-volume, yeah that is what i would do.
And in week 2-3 flood the market with supply, f*ck the scalpers.
Meanwhile, every day they aren't in stock means more $$$ into my parts fund.
At this rate, I'll have enough for a 3090 before 3080s are generally available!
It's impossible, you can't just reserve fab capacity on a whim. And you can't really stockpile until you can flood the market either.