During a sit-down with PC Games, Scot Herkelman from the VP of Radeon Gaming (AMD) said, “It’s been a weird time for gamers… there’s no doubt about it.” First, gaming rig manufacturers exorbitantly price their machines, with much of it being attributed to the graphics cards in them. Secondly, cryptocurrency miners have been scrambling for extra processing power, and GPUs have been the preferred choice chips for this endeavor.
In a nutshell, there has been too much demand, while the supply side of it has been struggling to keep up. A situation that has led the end gamer paying crazy prices for their superior gaming rigs. However, lately the craze for cryptocurrency mining seems to have died down, so the supply is quickly catching up with the demand, and thus a more reasonable price is prevailing in the market.
Even so, AMD still thinks the price charged by OEMs on the gaming rigs with beefy graphics cards is way above the acceptable range. The company wants to do something to remedy the situation for gamers while hoping its competitors will follow suit soon; mainly Nvidia.
“For the last year our focus has been on replenishing the channel,” said Herkelman, “but there’s only so much you can do to replenish a channel that is consuming everything that us, and our competitors, could make.
We don’t control pricing, and we don’t sell cards direct. Which is maybe something we should think about in the future by the way, because if this ever happens again on a global scale, we need to think of a different way that AMD can reach out on behalf of the gamers.”
