It was a fake price, and everybody knew that, the card really wasn't available at this price point. NVIDIA just though it would make people happy if they gave them a bs pricing. Soon after that I changed my reviews to use actual pricing that has availability, even if that means buying from eBay/scalpers
The (RTX 3080 MSRP) price wasn't fake from Nvidia's point of view, though. Nvidia certainly wasn't pocketing the difference until much later in the crypto-boom, when they started releasing cards with ludicrous MSRPs (or no MSRP at all). How do I know this? Because 3080 FE cards, though rare as hen's teeth,
did sell at MSRP from Best Buy. The scalpers were the only ones making signficant money over and above the MSRP, at first. Then the AIBs joined in at some point by simply setting their retail prices skyward (earlier for AMD, IIRC--$1,000+ 6700 XT cards at retail); then Nvidia got into the act.
So I'm not entirely sure what your argument is with regard to Nvidia "faking" the MSRP. Every time a new GPU launches, there's a shortage for a month or two or three. We're all used to that. We're also used to scalpers exacerbating shortage conditions. It makes sense to reference the "real street price" from a consumer perspective, and I applaud your doing that in your reviews during the shortage, but imputing some sort of ulterior motive to Nvidia in this case seems bizarre. Clearly Nvidia expected the cards to go for about $700 at the outset, just as prior generation *80 series cards had gone for more-or-less their MSRP after the initial rush. The Crypto-boom/COVID-era shortage took everyone by surprise.
That is what makes this 4080/4090 release look so terrible. Nvidia wants the crypto-boom feast to continue forever, or at the very least they want the consumer to pick up the tab for Nvidia's decision to over-commit with Ampere stock. I feel like Nvidia sort of hacked the tech-enthusiast press by starting with the halo card, then waiting a month to release this 4080 monstrosity; tech-media outlets thrive on hype, so they graded these cards on a curve for lack of anything else to look at. No offense to W1zzard; I love the guy's work, best tech site on the web, etc--but his comments here speak to my point: he's comparing the 4080 to prior-gen halo products that were explicitly terrible value (3080 Ti and up), and then declaring, "huh, the 4080 doesn't look so bad!"
Ordinarily we would have
started with an 80-class card in the 6-700 dollar range. Or let's say $800 to be generous. That then would be measured against prior "mainstream high end" 80-class cards, not measured against ludicrously bad value propositions.