If you have been trying to get your hands on an AMD RX Vega 64 graphics card you might have noticed that they are not selling at their $499 MSRP from retailers. It was reported that the $499 for the normal RX Vega 64 card with no games was a launch-only price set by AMD. So retailers could sell a select number of cards at this price and then the price would go up from there to $599 with FREE games for both the black and silver cards.
Now this is a little bit deceiving to the customer as when AMD announced the card they advertised it as the “New GPU King Under $500”, but after initial launch quantities were wiped out the card is actually $599.
The guys at PCGN has a chance to speak to AMD’s Gerald Youngblood on the showfloor of Gamescom recently and he said, “Our SEPs, and the price tag that we announced is our full intention of where we would suggest the product be priced. Not just for launch, but ongoing.
What happened, though, was we launched the product and the demand was really huge. Now we’re focused on replenishing so that there is plenty of stock so we can encourage our partners to hit the SEPs that we announced.”
So it seems AMD needs to fill retailers inventory to get the prices of the cards back down to normal.
“First of all we just need to drive as much stock as we can,” Youngblood says, “because inventory is really important in everybody being able to hit those prices. Then it’s just working with our partners to enable it, but we don’t set the price of their product. But we will drive, and do everything that we can, to get those prices to where we suggested when we launched them earlier.”
Supply and demand is definitely something that we do understand, but what doesn’t make sense is that retailers themselves are saying that they were only able to offer a set number of cards at the $499 price due to rebates offered by AMD. Now we know that AMD cannot control the price at which retailers sell the cards to consumers, but they definitely can control the price that they sell the cards to the retailers themselves.
This seems to be an ongoing saga with the Vega launch with AMD pointing fingers at retailers and retailers pointing fingers back. Hopefully prices on these cards do go down so more people can get their hands on them.
