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Comment by enlyth | Hacker News Reader

It's quite frustrating that this is becoming the norm, whether it be the 3XXX Nvidia cards, Playstation 5s, Ryzen CPUs, why is it that no hardware company can keep up with demand these days?

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What ever happened to the laws of supply and demand? If the demand is high, and the supply is limited, they should be raising their prices. Stockx says an xbox series X is worth $750, a PS5 is worth $950, and a Ryzen 5900X worth $800. Why can't vendors just raise their prices, so I can buy from a retail outlet I trust, rather than a scalper.

honestly I wonder the same thing, but I think the average consumer views this as something like "first-party scalping". large price movements (in either direction) immediately after release make people dislike the brand.

still doesn't make sense to me. these are computer parts, not insulin; set the price as high as is necessary to keep units in stock.

I know some of them worry about angering customers by "price gouging", but customers get mad when they can't get the product too. Might as well make money on the anger.

In a way people are getting gouged regardless by competing for a limited quanto. Whoever gets lucky and gets their hands on a unit can just go and upsell it at a higher price

By not increasing their prices AMD is letting the after market have that surplus. Sure they don't need to get their hands dirty (and risk negative PR), but also it means they can't ship as many units or profit as much as they could have.

A lot of it is because eventually production will catch up, and in the meantime companies want to catch consumer attention with the actual intended retail price while still big in the news rather than scaring them away with a higher launch price and then dropping it later and risk not catching the attention of uninvested customers.

There is also some marketing value in having a product sell out quickly.

I was in front of a 3060 ti, I could afford it but it was frigging $730 CAD and there is no way I am forking that amount of money to play video games.

For limited launches doing blind auctions would be really cool. You wouldn't have web pages melting down and requiring people to hammer f5, because you could run the auction for long enough that everyone can get their bid in. And at least theoretically scalpers should have much harder time making profit in a well-organized auction. And nobody can accuse vendor of price gouging in an auction because the price would be so purely market-driven.

COVID means spiked demand (people are bored) while reducing the supply cap (lockdown, broadened sick leaves, etc). Combine that with the separate spike caused by a solid HW generation all-around and the result shouldn't be too surprising.

They're all bottle-necked by availability at TSMC.

What's bottlenecking TSMC? The availability of more ASML equipment? The production of silicon? Literal floor space in the foundries? The ability to get stuff in or out of Taiwan?

For starters all the Xbox, PS5, Ryzen and RX chips come from the exact same production line. And the Samsung N8 yield doesn't seem to be anything special regarding Nvidia. Add that repeated waves of Covid lock-downs have made demand explode and that we're in the busiest period of the year anyway...

Probably limited capacity of state-of-the-art foundries.

So remember the pandemic

Scalpers aren't helping. I'd be super curious how many they've gotten vs normal customers.

Scalpers don't keep them. They redistribute them to normal customers.

...at elevated prices. "How much blood did the leech suck?" is a valid question. Dollars would be better units than number of video cards, but the number of video cards passing through the leeches correlates and is still meaningful.

...at elevated prices ...that the buyers were willing to pay.

All non-zero prices are elevated compared to zero. All parties are consenting here.

Same with the Series X, I want one of the boy for Xmas, co-worker of my missus managed to get 5 of them, he wanted 650 for a console he paid 450 for.

I told her to tell him where to shove it.

It's not that I can't afford it, it's that scalpers can go fuck themselves, the boy will be more than happy with Quest 2 and my current gaming PC in the new year when I can build another.

And whoever ends up with the one you didn't buy will be happy too. I see this as a win/win/win.

This happened with the Nvidia 2xxx cards too.

I think it's less that they can't keep up with demand, and more that they're "launching" earlier in the production process.

In the past they would have just launched later.

It's also a marketing ploy. It sounds much, much better when all you keep hearing is "out of stock", "sold out". It creates "fear of missing out" (FOMO). You know, like in real life when you see a long queue in front of a shop.

But then by the time they are in stock a successor is already around the corner.

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