The battle between gamers and cryptocurrency miners is never-ending. But eventually, cryptocurrency miners, thanks to more available resources,manage to buy out large stocks of graphics cards as soon as they hit the market. Meanwhile, despite increased pressure on the market,production could not be increased, leading to a surge in prices, which means that graphics cards sell for double or triple their marked prices. A volatile economy only means violent fluctuations when demand changes. So, when cryptocurrency values come soaring down, used markets flood the second-hand market,leading to huge losses, thanks to the prices cards have to be marked at to be sold off. This is something that chip manufacturers like NVIDIA cannot afford.
Companies like NVIDIA know that a gamer is a better end customer, respects their graphics cards more than a miner, who considers a graphics card to be a mining machine, a machine that mints money in the form of cryptocurrency. Miners have no loyalty, whereas a gamer satisfied with his upgrade remains loyal for quite a long time. NVIDIA is only a business, they need to take issues like price volatility and brand loyalty, just like any other business would. History has shown that when cryptocurrency crashes, miners sell their graphics card on second-hand black markets at prices much lower than ones offered by the companies like NVIDIA. Needless to say,that hurts their business. In 2014, this had caused AMD quite some grief after the cryptocurrency crash. NVIDIA wants to avoid a similar issue, and price volatility is reduced if they make more money off gamers than off miners, though miners are ready to pay more for the hardware.
NVIDIA has recently started selling graphics cards through their own website,which offers free shipping as well. Not only that, they have issued a statement to all retailers to actually limit graphics card sales to 2 per person. Unfortunately, NVIDIA can’t directly dictate whether retailers follow the recommendations, and that’s exactly why the direct sales are so significant in curtailing price volatility, and ensuring that gamers get to buy their graphics cards.
This is a decent move by NVIDIA,which can improve the lack of 1060’s, 1070’s or 1080’s on the shelves of stores or the malls, which has been a topic of discussion everywhere, from hardware forums to Reddit and social media.