A Japanese electronics store has inadvertently caused mayhem after attempting to run a lottery for prospective buyers of Nvidia’s new RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 gaming GPUs. The store planned to hand out up to 100 tickets to those in line, but far more people turned up, causing damage to the local area and trespassing on neighboring properties in order to skip ahead in the line.
The store in question is called PC Koubou, and like many stores around the world, this one was having to deal with the reality of extremely limited supply of new Nvidia RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs. However, while it came up with an idea for how to be as fair and reasonable at handing out cards as it could, some of those wanting to grab the new best graphics card champions weren’t so high-minded.
According to a local Reddit user, “more than 400 people showed up,” and there are reports of people shouting, line cutting, and worse. According to X user sarasteam0151, people clambered over the neighboring kindergarten to try to get ahead of the queue. The local Reddit user also corroborated this, saying that people “trespassed” and “destroyed the signboard in the process.”
They also added that PC Koubou canceled the RTX 5080 lottery, and sold its 5090 stock to those who managed to snag a ticket. However, they suspect those who did queue early are “Chinese scalpers”.
China is currently blocked from buying the full 5090, having to settle for the AI-neutered 5090D. As Nvidia can’t sell to the country, Japanese scalpers and others surrounding it are said to be going all in on buying up what they can for quick profit.
On X, user sakai_eggman said that it’s possible to make a “profit of 300,000 yen per item”. If the GPU is bought at the list price of $2000 (or 307,850 yen), they can essentially double their money.
Through proxy service Buyee, we can see one RTX 5090 for sale for 800,000 yen, or $5197 on Yahoo Auctions. Scalpers are also beginning to crawl out of the woodwork in the West as well, with eBay lighting up with new, scalping auctions.
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The RTX 5000 series appears to be struggling with stock right now, and there’s potential for it to last quite some time. While the stock situation likely won’t be as bad as it was in 2020 or 2021, it seems a lot of potential PC builders looking for the might of the RTX 5090 will have to wait just that bit longer – or shell out $3000 for one of Asus’ fancy water-cooled cards.