I've never seen this accusation before. I want to give the benefit of the doubt but I suspect it's confusing scalping with MSRP-baiting.
It's important to note that nVidia mostly doesn't sell or even make finished consumer-grade GPUs. They own and develop the IP cores, and they contract with TSMC and others to make the chips, and they do make limited runs of "Founders Edition" cards, but most cards that are available to consumers undergo final assembly and retail boxing according to the specs of the partner -- ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, formerly EVGA, etc.
MSRP-baiting is what happens when nVidia sets the MSRP without consulting any of its partners and then those partners go and assemble the graphics cards and have to charge more than that to make a reasonable profit. This has been going on for many GPU generations now, but it's not scalping. We can question why this "partnership" model even exists in the first place, since these middlemen offer very little unique value vs any of their competitors anymore, but again nVidia has the upper hand here and thus the lion's share of the blame.
Scalping is when somebody who's ostensibly outside of the industry buys up a bunch of GPUs at retail prices, causing a supply shortage, so that they can resell the cards at higher prices. While nVidia doesn't have direct control over this (though I wouldn't be too surprised if it came out that there was some insider involvement), they also never do very much to address it either. Getting all the hate for this without directly reaping the monetary benefit sounds irrational at first, but artificial scarcity and luxury goods mentality are real business tactics.
alt Hacker News
I've never seen this accusation before. I want to give the benefit of the doubt but I suspect it's confusing scalping with MSRP-baiting.
It's important to note that nVidia mostly doesn't sell or even make finished consumer-grade GPUs. They own and develop the IP cores, and they contract with TSMC and others to make the chips, and they do make limited runs of "Founders Edition" cards, but most cards that are available to consumers undergo final assembly and retail boxing according to the specs of the partner -- ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, formerly EVGA, etc.
MSRP-baiting is what happens when nVidia sets the MSRP without consulting any of its partners and then those partners go and assemble the graphics cards and have to charge more than that to make a reasonable profit. This has been going on for many GPU generations now, but it's not scalping. We can question why this "partnership" model even exists in the first place, since these middlemen offer very little unique value vs any of their competitors anymore, but again nVidia has the upper hand here and thus the lion's share of the blame.
Scalping is when somebody who's ostensibly outside of the industry buys up a bunch of GPUs at retail prices, causing a supply shortage, so that they can resell the cards at higher prices. While nVidia doesn't have direct control over this (though I wouldn't be too surprised if it came out that there was some insider involvement), they also never do very much to address it either. Getting all the hate for this without directly reaping the monetary benefit sounds irrational at first, but artificial scarcity and luxury goods mentality are real business tactics.