Nvidia Confirms Scalpers and Bots Destroyed 3080 Stock Levels

With the GeForce RTX 3080 officially going on general retail sale yesterday, there were a lot of consumers anxiously looking forward to trying out Nvidia’s latest graphics card to see for themselves just how good it really is! As such, while it should have been a very memorable day for many PC enthusiasts for the vast majority of people, it was, but for all the wrong reasons.

With scalpers and bots practically draining all online supplies within literally seconds of their official launch, it has led to a lot of legitimate purchasers finding nothing but disappointment as they patiently sat waiting for them to go on sale.

On a very small plus side, however, in a report via Videocardz, Nvidia has at least both acknowledged and apologized for this occurring.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080

I can personally attest to knowing at least four people who were sat at their desks yesterday, occasionally hitting that F5 button, waiting to purchase a GeForce RTX 3080 that they fully intended to use and own themselves. In all but one instance, however, they all reportedly pretty much exactly the same experience.

“Welp… 3080 sold out in less than 1 second. All preorders went from ”Notify me” to ”Sold out” in a split second. Buybots are now going to upsell the cards. Good luck out there!“

What Does Nvidia Have to Say?

In responding to clear anger among the legitimate PC community, Nvidia has acknowledged that scalper bots have created a really big problem here and, put simply, with them now available to purchase in some places with 100% mark-ups, getting one within the next couple of weeks (and possibly longer) will not be easy nor cheap.

It does, however, seem that moving forward, Nvidia is going to attempt to restructure their store to attempt to prevent this from happening again.

“This morning we saw unprecedented demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 at global retailers, including the NVIDIA online store. At 6 a.m. pacific we attempted to push the NVIDIA store live. Despite preparation, the NVIDIA store was inundated with traffic and encountered an error. We were able to resolve the issues and sales began registering normally.

To stop bots and scalpers on the NVIDIA store, we’re doing everything humanly possible, including manually reviewing orders, to get these cards in the hands of legitimate customers.

Over 50 major global retailers had inventory at 6 a.m. pacific. Our NVIDIA team and partners are shipping more RTX 3080 cards every day to retailers.

We apologize to our customers for this morning’s experience.”

So, while we can’t tell you what to do, we would at least hope that some people haven’t felt the pressure to go to a scalper to get their 3080 because, while we would entirely understand the desire, it clearly isn’t going to do much to help solve this problem in the future! – Lest we forgot, there’s still the 3090, 3070, and 3060 to go!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!