Last month of May, Nvidia has unveiled the latest in its powerful line of graphics cards GTX 1080 and 1070.
Nvidia demonstrated the power of the new GTX 1080 graphics cards by playing Doom at 1080p resolution with all the graphics properties maxed out. The result is a highly impressive 200 frames per second.
For such great power, Nvidia is actually offering the graphics card at a pretty reasonable price. The GTX 1080, which launched on May 27, would be priced at $699 for the special Founder's Edition and $599 for the regular model. This is what was announced, atleast.
Pricing of GTX 1080 in Indian Market by Amazon.in
On May 27, when the GTX 1080 graphics card are officially released and officially available in Amazon.in (India's one of top three online shopping eCommerce website) Indian gamers, tech-lovers gets shock of their life.
Zotac, Gigabyte, ASUS have listed their price 57% to 87% higher than the price announced at the Nvidia launch event.
- Zotac asking for U$D +411 (+59%) extra!
- Gigabyte asking for U$D +396 (+57%) extra!
- ASUS asking for U$D +411 (+59%) extra!
also
- ASUS non-Founder's Edition asking for U$D +525 (+87%) extra!
(This is epic to see non-Founder's Edition is more expensive than Founder's Edition)
Shocked, disappointed and angry Indians found their way to take revenge.
They are flooding the Amazon product pages of Zotac, Gigabyte, ASUS with 1 STAR reviews and negative comments.
For Indians, this is the perfect weapon for them to show their protest and grab the attention of greedy managements of Nvidia, Zotac, Gigabyte, ASUS.
Their anger has one common point, 57% to 87% extra can not be due to Tax. Shipping cost also do not add that much extra charge specially other graphics card are coming from the same factory, same country, China.
Their demand is simple, Price Equality. They are not asking for subsidized price, rather equal price that is being sold in US, plus Govt. Tax.
Even though, the USN to INR exchange rate has gone up from @55 to @66, they they are willing to pay $599 / $699 as advertised on release event.
Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Graphics Card "Founders Edition"
Great job by NVIDIA and Zotac for selling a U$D 699 card at U$D 1110 to rip-off Indian customers in the name of Tax! Extra: U$D 411 (+59%)
Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 "Founders Edition" 8GB GDDR5X VR-Ready/Pascal Architecture 256-bit PCI-Express Graphics Card
Great job by NVIDIA and Gigabyte for selling a U$D 699 card at U$D 1095 to rip-off Indian customers in the name of Tax! Extra: U$D 396 (+57%)
Asus Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 "Founders Edition" 8GB GDDR5X VR-Ready/G-Sync/PascalTM architecture PCI-Express Graphics Card
Great job by NVIDIA and ASUS for selling a U$D 699 card at U$D 1110 to rip-off Indian customers in the name of Tax! Extra: U$D 411 (+59%)
ASUS nVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 DirectCU III ROG Strix Gaming Aura RGB 8GB GDDR5X VR-Ready/G-Sync/Pascal Architecture PCI-Express Graphics Card
Great job by NVIDIA and ASUS for selling a U$D 599 card (non-Founder's Edition) at U$D 1124 to rip-off Indian customers in the name of Tax! The price is even higher than the "Founder's Edition"! Extra: U$D 525 (+87%)
Nvidia GTX 1080 Reviews by YouTubers
Last month of May, Nvidia unveiled the latest in its powerful line of graphics cards GTX 1080 and 1070 and announced the release date as May 27th, 2016.
But, before the official release, YouTube site was filled with GTX 1080 preview and reviews and even mods/overclocking by thousands of YouTube and tech-sites reviewers.
Where they get the card(s) from? Did they buy those cards?
The cards were not available in the market yet!
Answer: They got the cards FREE from Nvidia.
Some of them got multiple pcs, multiple editions to show-off their SLI setup.
As they don't have to buy, they even started wining about the limitation that GTX 1080 can not have more than 2-way SLI. For them they want to do 4-way SLI or more and want all cards for free from Nvidia.
No YouTuber or tech-site mention whether they bought the card by their own money or got them for FREE.
Now, Nvidia has to recover these money that they gave away as thousands of free graphics cards for those YouTubers and tech-sites.
Simple, add the cost with the Retail MRP / MSRP price, specially for the developing market.
Customers are dumb-ass here. Just milk them.
Nvidia Market Share
Even though there is competition in the graphics card market, and there is a push from the AMD red-team, the percentage is not well balanced. Its almost 56% vs 25% according to latest Steam Hardware Survey, which is not accurate but close enough. That is Nvidia has more than double market share than AMD and more than AMD alone and more than Intel HD and AMD combined.
In Indian market also, we have more vendors from Nvidia team than AMD team.
In Nvidia team, there are ASUS, Zotac, Gigabyte, MSI and few eVGA also.
In AMD team, there is mainly Sapphire and few XFX and PowerColor.
(Survey based on Kolkata retail market. There are some other brands available but they do not have any service center in Kolkata nor India. They are sold directly by the importers through eCommerce websites like Amazon.in / Flipkart / Snapdeal etc.)
Also at the launch of Nvidia GTX 1080, there is not a single competitor card in the arsenal of AMD red-team.
All these market factors gave Nvidia the power of market monopoly.
And so they can now list their price 57% to 87% higher than the price announced at the Nvidia launch event.
And no one can complain. Or is it?
Indian Customers Response
Shocked, disappointed and angry Indians found their only way to take revenge. They are flooding the Amazon product pages of Zotac, Gigabyte, ASUS with 1 STAR reviews and negative comments. They can not contact the greedy managements of Nvidia, Zotac, Gigabyte, ASUS. Neither those managements ever showed any interest to read the mentality of Indian customers and gamers. Do they really ever did any market study here?
These types of absurd pricing of Processor and Graphics card, makes PC gamers like us switch to Console gaming which is far far cheaper and long-term maintenance free. Games may be expensive but just wait for 2nd-hand sale.
Call of Duty®: Infinite Warfare Reveal Trailer
On May 2, 2016, when Official Call of Duty®: Infinite Warfare YouTube trailer released, it quickly became YouTube's 2nd most DIS-LIKED video! (Source)
This is another example of customers using the power of review/like/dis-like to not only express their feelings but also to send a strong, very strong message to the managements.
This weapon of 'Mass -ve Review' is not new to Indian customers. Few months ago, when one famous India actor made some controversial comments about the living condition in India, Indian people got so angry that they started to post negative reviews in another online e-commerce website. They flooded the website with negative reviews of every product they bought. At the end, he had to step down as the brand-ambassador of that website.
DO NOT MESS WITH ANGRY INDIANS.
In-fact, don't make them angry in the 1st place.
We have to see if there is any change on pricing before or after the launch of upcoming AMD graphics card.
