[Hardware] Data Engineer Examines Q4 Scalping in PC and Console Market

[HiTLeR]

Scalpers are raking in tens of millions of dollars

 

 

Scalping has become one of the most irritating things afflicting the PC hardware and gaming console markets at the moment. With scalpers snatching up what little volume there is of the latest hardware, they make buying a new graphics card or CPU or game console nearly impossible -- at least at the MSRP. So Data Engineer Michael Driscoll from dev.to set out to see just how much money these scalpers have made off of the recent shiny new hardware, to hopefully get an idea as to how long this problem will last.

 

Driscoll created a program that can grab all of eBay's sold listings for the latest generation AMD and Nvidia silicon, as well as the two new consoles, and put them all together to get an idea of how prices were trending and how much money scalpers were making on these products. While eBay isn't the only place scalpers can sell products, it's where most scalpers go to sell the latest and greatest Nvidia and AMD hardware.

 

But first, a step back: If you don't know what scalping is, it's when a person (or company) buys a product for the sole purpose of making a profit off of it, specifically, selling it for much more money than the MSRP. This "hobby" works due to supply and demand; when supply is low and demand is high, scalpers can make huge profits. Because if demand is high enough, there will be a customer base that simply won't care how much that product will cost and buy it anyway. When supply starts meeting demand on a broad enough scale, scalpers lose almost all momentum because buyers can go to official retailers and buy the product at a fair price.

 

Michael's graphs aren't based on actual prices. Rather they are based on percentages, with each product's MSRP being the baseline. That makes reading these graphs a bit easier.

 

almost immediately on eBay for 180% of its normal value. As we move along into October of 2020, it became way worse, with the 3080 selling at 220% above its MSRP. Fortunately, as we got into November, things have somewhat stabilized, with the 3080s going back to selling at 180% above its MSRP. But that's still way more than the suggested price.

 

Much is the same with the RTX 3090. Many scalpers were selling the card at 220% of its MSRP right off the bat. Then things died down, with the card now selling for around the 140% mark. That's better than the RTX 3080 but still ridiculous pricing for the 3090.

 

But that's where the good news (if there was any) ends; Nvidia's RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti are probably the worst offenders when it comes to eBay pricing. These are mid-ranged cards, and customers are looking at the price just as much as performance, compared to the 3080 and 3090, where buyers are more concerned about pure performance than general affordability. The 3070 started selling immediately at 180% of its MSRP on eBay and really hasn't gone down since then. The same goes for the RTX 3060 Ti, which sells at 165% of its targeted MSRP.

 

Overall according to Driscoll, scalpers have made $8,669,418 on RTX 3090s, $10,326,885 on RTX 3080s, $3,321,113 on RTX 3070s and $67,636 from RTX 3060 Tis. 3060 TI sales are low due to it being less than a month old.