Nvidia released the GeForce RTX 3080 last week at 9 AM Thursday morning. The card sold out pretty much everywhere within the hour. Local and online stores are now stating that shipments of new cards won't arrive until October and have set about taking pre-orders for that new shipment.
Gamers got a preview of this sort of demand way back with the RTX 20-series cards released, but there was hope this time would be different. Nvidia had said they'd have systems in place to defeat automated bots that just bought up inventory wherever they could in order to resell it on Ebay for a profit, but whatever those systems were, they clearly failed.
However, where Nvidia fails, gamers succeed. If you head to Ebay to check out the current listings for an RTX 3080, you’ll probably see quite a few bizarre ads for GPUs being bid up to $50,000 beside ads for “paper edition” RTX 3080s. These are all tactics designed to screw with scalpers so they can’t profit from denying everyone a reasonably-priced video card.
Let's take a look at these super expensive listings. Sure, there might just be a millionaire out there with money to burn and is willing to pay the price of a new Mercedes for the hottest new video card out there, but more likely these are fake bids that will never get paid. In fact, a popular post on Reddit claims that someone made a bot to bid up these listings in order to deny scalpers their payday.
And then there's the outright fake listings. Here we have someone selling the RTX 3080 "Paper Edition," which is pretty what it sounds like.
"Have you ever wanted a piece of paper with a picture of a rtx 3080 but don’t have a printer?" asks the listing. "Don’t worry I got you covered."
Other fake listings get even more creative, such as this one. "Brand new RTX 3080 edition special drink for scalpers. I highly recommend a glass of this drink for the scalpers who use bots to wreck the GPU market."
Of course, there’s nothing that can be done to combat the “buy it now” listings that price the RTX 3080 at around $1,500 USD, but at least those scalpers aren’t able to maximize their payday with an open auction.
The RTX 3090 hits the market this Thursday. Demand for the oversized card is likely to be somewhat more muted than it was for the RTX 3080, but that likely just means it’ll sell out in 2 hours rather than one. Here’s hoping that scalpers will have had their fill by the time the RTX 3070 arrives in October.