An industry-wide price hike on graphic card prices has hit gamers hard, as the motive of getting rich quick drives bitcoin miners to buy up graphics cards on the market. This causes availability to become patchy and encourages supply intermediaries to mark up the prices that are then passed onto consumers.
Graphics card giant Nvidia has already spoken out against the impact of bitcoin mining, but merely doing so and encouraging merchants to put gamers’ interests first is unlikely to have any real-world effect.
The best solution has already been highlighted in a Digital Trends article. With card manufacturers releasing purpose-built mining graphics cards that are cheaper and lack video connectors, it is hoped that the market can be separated along gaming and bitcoin mining lines, sparing gamers the price hikes on graphics cards.
Here at Ashen Glow Gaming Store, we keep our graphics card prices as low as possible. We do not benefit from scalping off pre-existing stock bought before the bitcoin gaming phenomenon, firstly due to the recency of our founding, but secondly, also because of our pro-gamer policy in which we believe in gamers looking out for gamers.
Our policy is not to raise our profit margins to take advantage of the bitcoin boom, however, we are at the mercy of our suppliers upstream who appear to be passing price hikes down to us. For that reason, we too feel the pricing pressures and sorely look forward to the advent of purpose-built mining graphics cards. This should hopefully take the pricing pressures off of gaming cards. As such dedicated mining cards become available, we will include them in our offerings to help promote the segregation of the market along bitcoin mining and gaming lines.
