Ever since September 2020, the PC gaming world has been enamored with the release of the NVIDIA RTX 3000 series graphics cards. With a brand new architecture and enhanced capabilities for neural networks, creative software, and gaming, most importantly, the world has found itself the newest powerhouse for modern tech. Yet as soon as they got in stock, they were sold out. Best Buy, Newegg, Walmart, Amazon, Adorama, and Microcenter all sold out of the precious cards within seconds. For months on end, many have been unable to get their hands on the amazing cards, with most of the stock depleting and going to scalpers and bots; COVID-19 also played a part, forcing factories in China to shut down indefinitely until the problem subsides. Speaking of which, the same cards were upmarked on popular reselling sites like eBay, with cards like the RTX 3080 selling for $1000+ instead of the standard $699 MSRP. Now, the problem continues to get worse. Rather than dropping, continual purchasing and enabling of the scalping situation has caused prices to skyrocket, with prices for some cards reaching 2 or 3 times more than their respective MSRPs.

When the RTX 3000 series GPUs were released, many gamers frantically sold their cards in order to get their hands on something with substantially more powerful. With NVIDIA’s announcement that the RTX 3070 was also more powerful than an RTX 2080 Ti, many gamers rushed to sell their card, selling on the street for ~$450 instead of it’s retail price of $1,199. Then the stock depleted; many gamers were left without GPUs and were reaching in deepest depths of their pockets to afford marked-up cards. And yes, people still kept buying. Now? Prices continue to skyrocket on the street, with the RTX 3080 now costing 3X its MSRP(around $2,100) and the RTX 3090 now costing 2X its MSRP(nearly $3,000!). 

With the current situation still digging itself deeper into a never-ending rabbit hole of scalping and depleting stock, it’s safe to say that everyone’s hoping the situation ends. Not to mention, what about the endless PS5s and XBOX Series X’s that are also getting endless scrutiny. At this point, who knows if NVIDIA’s next GPUs will come out, and also get scalped?