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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

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.

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