Almost five months have passed since the release of the Nvidia RTX 30 Series, and though consumers are willing to pay well above the MSRP, it’s been almost impossible to purchase a card without paying hand over fist.

Primarily, there are two reasons for this. Firstly, due to the RTX’s extremely high clock speeds, they have become relatively lucrative for crypto-mining farms. Secondly, a fair number of “business savvy” scalpers decided they would do well to mass purchase these GPU’s and resell them for exorbitant prices. Regardless of the how and why it’s become incredibly difficult for the average person to get their hands on an RTX 30 card and this needs to stop.

Though it may seem easy to identify the culprits, it’s much more complicated than simply blaming crypto-miners or scalpers. What we have here is a failure to balance supply and demand, and the fault lies not only with Nvidia, but the third party manufacturers, and the retailers who sell them.

For instance, Nvidia (who is responsible for designing their GPU’s but not necessarily building and selling them) released a limited supply of their Founder’s Edition cards. Within a day, and well before the average PC gamer could grab one, a bot quickly gobbled up 42 units of the RTX 3080 for one lucky re-seller in particular. This is by no means an isolated incident either. Not only were many online retailers sold out due to similar bot infestations, but many brick-and-mortar stores were only provided with as few as 10 units to sell, leaving the masses hungry and wanting. For most of you who are still desperate to grab an RTX 3060/3070/3080 or 3090, they can be found here, for up to a 400% markup on their market suggested price. Though this isn’t illegal, you would think that retailers and Nvidia itself would have some form of protection to prevent their loyal customers from being taken advantage of.

A similar, but by no means less revolting, transaction continues to occur between Nvidia and its third-party manufacturers, to the cancerous large scale crypto-miners of the world. It’s reported that Nvidia has sold at least $175 million worth of the GeForce RTX 30 graphic cards directly to miners. Furthermore, companies like MSI, Gigabyte, and PALIT have been accused of pre-selling massive quantities of the RTX to crypto-miners, adding heavily to the shortages. Not to mention that an MSI subsidiary “Starlit Partner” has been caught scalping their own cards on eBay for up to $1000 dollars over the normal pricing.

We may live in a free market, and some might say Nvidia, the third-party manufacturers and the retailers, have the right to sell to whoever is willing to buy. I say, however, that the third-party manufactures and the retailers have an obligation to their customers, and that to release a product that arguably is designed for gamers and developers while not protecting their right to purchase them is criminal at best. It has now been 5 months, and the situation seems grimmer than ever. With Chinese New Year leaving factories closed for weeks, and reports of crypto-miners mass purchasing RTX 30 capable laptops, the shortages on these cards is about to get much worse, not better. And though COVID-19 certainly is partly responsible for these shortages, it’s important to release that the release of the GeForce RTX 30 Series has been so mismanaged that shortages were likely to exist no matter what.

The sad reality is that there are only two competing architectures to choose from, Nvidia and AMD. If the supplier fails to meet the demand long enough, new architects will come and fill the gap. Though it may take years for companies like INTEL to break into the market properly, the day will hopefully come when manufacturers and retailers regret the poor choices they’ve made, and the unfair effect it’s had on their loyal customers.