You know what they say, a scalper's pain is a gamer's gain (actually I just made that up), because scalpers that jumped the gun on NVIDIA's RTX 4080 have been left holding the bag and are struggling to return their purchases or sell them on the open market under their cost basis. The news comes from Reddit (via Videocardz, via Mooreslawisdead). Image credits here.
Retailers like Newegg remove the refund option for NVIDIA's RTX 4080, leaving scalpers scampering in the direction of third-party marketplaces
Posts on r/PCMR show that scalpers are flocking to various marketplaces like Facebook in an effort to offload their scalped stash of NVIDIA RTX 4080s. It looks like they are having trouble the inventory even at a very "generous" pricing close to MSRP ($1200). Quite understandably, gamers that were left in the lurch during the cryptocurrency mining boom are watching this unfold with glee.
Scalpers have made an easy profit on pretty much all NVIDIA GPU launches in the recent past but it looks like it is time to face the music when it comes to the RTX 4080. This card is hard enough to move at MSRP so people that bought up the SKUs in bulk hoping to flip them for a profit are in for a rude awakening.
Interestingly, another reason why scalpers are flocking to third party marketplaces is provided by MLiD, who spotted that retailers like Newegg have removed their refund policy for the NVIDIA RTX 4080 - meaning scalpers cannot take the easy road of simply returning the product to the retailer they scalped it from. This would mean that a pricing war should soon ensue which should apply selling pressure to the RTX 4080 pricing and automatically bring it below the MSRP due to market forces.
Scalpers returning their #Nvidia RTX 4080s they couldn't sell on eBay is a big issue for retailers...
It's so big that @Newegg just removed the refund option for many 4080s!!!
Sorry scalpers, you need to keep that stupid 4080!🤣https://t.co/aCyYIZ7nnBhttps://t.co/sjKjJGwMvz pic.twitter.com/E337vziBJU
— Moore's Law Is Dead (@mooreslawisdead) December 1, 2022
The NVIDIA RTX 4080 is starting to develop quite the embattled history. First, its 12GB variant, which wasn't actually a RTX 4080 (it had lower CUDA cores and was actually in the RTX 4070 Ti class), was cancelled after not-negligible-consumer-and-media-backlash. Now it seems that the public isn't being very receptive to the RTX 4080 16GB either. Meanwhile, the RTX 4090 is selling like hotcakes and flying off the shelves even though it is significantly more pricey.
The reason might have something to do with the value that the cards offer. While the RTX 4090 offers $19.5 USD per TFLOP, the RTX 4080 only offers offers a TFOP for $24.6. This means that the RTX 4080, at its $1200 price point offers 21% less value per dollar than the RTX 4090. There is also the consideration that people who want the absolute best GPU that money can buy will go for the RTX 4090 and at $1200, the RTX 4080 is not something the mainstream gamer can afford. NVIDIA appears to have miscalculated the market depth at the $1200 price point. If you take the same TFLOP per USD as the RTX 4090, the price of the RTX 4080 should have been $949 USD, and that is the maximum price point we believe the card should have launched with.
