Earlier last week, NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5080 on sale, while the RTX 5090 broke cover a week before that and on top of that, the cards – Founders Edition and AIB partners alike – have seemingly sold out ahead of their launch. In Japan, a hardware store decidedly tried to utilise a lottery system to stem the tide of scalpers gobbling up the cards and…well, the situation has gone over as well as one would imagine such an action would.
Japanese hardware chain, PC Kouboy, had reportedly implemented a lottery system across all the chain in an effort to control the sales of NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 and 5080 cards and, as mentioned, try to prevent scalpers from getting their hands on what was already limited stock.
パソコン工房パーツ館でRTX5090の抽選の呼びかけが始まりましたが、現場は大混乱しております。
怒号が飛び交い、あろうことか隣の幼稚園の柵に登る人まで出る始末。#RTX5090 pic.twitter.com/BIPOLdXays— 立山登 (@tateyamanoboru1) January 30, 2025
On 30 January at around 3PM local time, over in the city of Chiyoda, customers were seen queuing outside one of the chain stores; the line was long and some folks in the line ultimately were getting a little too excited, to the extent that they clambered over and into a kindergarten fence, and even reportedly defaced a sign inside school ground. All in the hopes of being one of the lottery winners who would be allowed to purchase one of the NVIDIA RTX 5090 or 5080 cards.
It is believed that, because of the scene, Koubou stores located in Nagoya Osu and Osaka Nihonbashi announced a change of plans and shifted all lottery applications onto an online platform. More to the point, the situation highlights just how limited the number of RTX 50 Series GPUs are; at the time, PC Koubou only had 15 units of the RTX 5090 and 113 units of the 5080.
Current line update 💀 Tustin location
byu/Tough-Technology-241 inMicrocenter
It’s not stores in Japan that are suffering from the shortage of RTX 50 Series GPUs. Over in Europe, scalper bots have supposedly been able to accumulate NVIDIA RTX 5090s and 5080s, before the cards’ expected availability date. Not only that, some German retailers have also been seen inflating the price of their day-one card stock, more than double the SRP of the 5090’s MSRP of US$1,999 (~RM8,905).
Over in the US, reports are coming that more than 300 folks camped outside a MicroCentre in California, all in the hopes of being able to purchase an NVIDIA RTX 50 Series card.
