LIVE Archive: Recap of MSI Controversy News & "Scalping" Claims

i think we should be live let me know if you can see and hear everything okay i am a one-man show right now this is a a live news update just on some controversy that pops up overnight i wanted to get this all covered in one go so it is not an edited video if you're watching later i apologize but uh this blew up really fast and i'd like to get back to work on the other things i was doing so i'm working one man show right now let me know if you can hear and see everything okay this is going to be short we're going to just kind of get through this story get it over with so i get back to the other content uh people say it works okay cool so um thank you yeah so first of all heads up i'm not gonna be taking uh like all the super chats like normally i might read one or two but i don't want please if you want me to like read your thing save that for another stream um because i i don't want to be here all night because it's 3 30 a.m right now and i've still got four hours of work left so um all right the quick recap for you is there was a controversy that popped up this will be an archive on the channel later it was a live show really late and i will recap it for you and i'm going to cover uh msi's statement that they put out we i basically spent all night on um someone says uh so i can get back to other content no you go to bed young man that's from nabilus uh so i was on the phone for a couple hours about two hours with a lot of people all over the industry a couple people at msi off record and so we have some information for you to share msi did share a statement as well i want to share some insight and sort of talk about responsible like reporting and responsible reactions to things um so a quick recap msi controversy basically there was a reddit thread that popped up that said the uh that showed links to an msi 3080 gaming trio i think it was listed for about two times msrp and uh this is in line with behavior that you've all seen at this point from individuals meaning not necessarily companies from individuals over the past several weeks for all brands basically scalping cards and so with the context of cards getting sold at scalper prices for the last few weeks plus the context of msi video card at 1400. basically this was another one of those this looks like a scalper situation the difference this time was that the card was officially listed by an account which was indirectly tied to msi so that's the story basically this this then blew up on reddit as uh as msi is scalping its customers and msi is selling its video card for two times msrp to try and i don't know if profiteers maybe legally not the correct word i'm not sure i know that has a legal definition but uh let's say maximize the profits on a product during a time when it is difficult to obtain that product so coming from potentially a first party this at the time this all happened that wasn't confirmed from potentially a first party uh is what made this the story that it was as opposed to from some random scalper on the internet that's why this blew up the way it did so i'm sorry i'm like i know i'm like a little offbeat on my sentence patterns versus normally because i'm trying to keep an eye over here to make sure i'm not losing connection or anything i'm i don't have a andrew here to monitor the camera this time all right so that's the recap if you missed it off uh there was a lot of reddit slew thing going on and some of it was actually pretty good work we were doing some of the same stuff on our own end and there was also some of it that was like super jumping to conclusions in a potentially very harmful way not necessarily to msi but just like in general to the industry so i'll talk about that a little bit too but um some of the interesting stuff that came up was people digging through like patent filings trademarks stuff like that i guess it was trademarks not patents so first of all be careful when you're looking up trademarks and to whom they are registered because it doesn't necessarily tell you the whole story in this case the uh what was it called starlet starlet partners i think is the name of the ebay account that was selling these cards in this case that company is a subsidiary of msi that was at this point confirmed or at least a partner working directly with msi um i guess i should i should probably read them aside statement before i kind of go off and explain the rest of this so let's do that so this is a msi statement hopefully this thing pops up on screen okay this was on their twitter account let's read this before we go any further msi took a few hours to put this out which is really not bad considering the time it is uh us had to respond to this i was on the phone with people in taiwan uh it's late enough where when i called taiwan and they answered the phone and i said i said uh which is a really stupid question because i asked them if they speak chinese and what i meant to ask was an equation so do you speak english so anyway it's late enough that that was happening but um yeah so we talked to them and this is the statement that came out shortly after that uh we kind of they actually the people we spoke with internally were not aware of this controversy when we first reached out to them um so that's how kind of fresh it was uh so there the the statements on the screen but they said um uh starlight partners is an individual sales subsidiary working under msi and it says they carry excess inventory and refurbished items but not be given newly released products and uh you can read the the rest of it but um basically i guess where's the the main thing we need to point out here starlight partners has been instructed to contact the individual customers who purchased these graphics card products and offered two options one return the product and receive a full refund or two a partial refund of the amount paid over msrp so that is the super important bit of information um and michael terpia steve speaks mandarin uh eat the end yet i've been studying for about a year and a half moving forward msi will enforce a stricter policy to avoid situations like this happening again so let me get this off the screen that's on the twitter account if you want to read it uh all right so then now that that's all stated msi site is stated and the initial controversy has stated what did we learn first of all i guess my my thoughts first of all immediate thought is on twitter email reddit tags everywhere we were getting slammed with people asking for us to look into this that is very cool i very much appreciate that it's it's so much different than it used to be but people like come to us now and say you got to get in on this so that's awesome i appreciate it thank you for sending me tips and heads ups because that's how we stay on top of the industry uh these did evolve to a point where i put out a tweet saying like okay okay we got it like i know i'm looking into it give me a minute um so normally after a little bit the uh the um the message gets to us and if it's like four hours later we probably are aware of it uh so it became like enough where i was actually having trouble working on talking to the people i needed to talk to because of the amount of notifications we were getting uh all right so my thoughts number one i i do genuinely and i see hardware and box in the chat and i was talking with him about this i do genuinely think that the community overall does need to like give people a little bit of time to look into things before going full meltdown we've seen this a few times lately like with the capacitor stuff where it's it's so instant the influx of people who are freaking out about an issue it blindsides all of us in media to the extent that we kind of have trouble researching it properly and there's this tremendous pressure of like you have to people want that that reaction people a lot of maybe not our audience but a lot of people are looking for that gut reaction of what's your you know like reacting to a bit to a video to music what's your reaction of this news not necessarily what is the news what's the uh responsible reporting of the news but what is your reaction to it so that's one of the things that i was kind of complaining to hardware uh unboxed about where it's just it's like i wish we could maybe get a little bit away from that but that's way bigger than the hardware industry it's a much wider issue so in the future when these things pop up and if you've told us about it just know that we're probably working on it but also know that we're not going to respond like instantly with the gut instinct reaction because we're probably trying to collect all the information before we just say stuff same thing with the capacitor and the frequency stuff where on stream last time i said i don't want to talk about this right now because i haven't read about it and i don't know all the information i can make stuff up and just kind of say what i think based on what chat tells me but that's not really what i want to do so that's first thing i want to get out of the way is that second thing is uh what msi did what what looks like is going on so we spoke with a lot of people in the industry like i said i actually called linus as well and said you know hey can you what's your experience from the former retailer side of things how did it work so we talked with a lot of people and the initial reaction i got from most people other than lioness who knew about this was what msi controversy what are you talking about uh which is kind of amusing because this is like talking to a lot of people in the video card industry and they hadn't heard about it yet so that's how fast it blew up where this was like the biggest story on reddit on twitter and uh the industry partners who compete with msi who work at msi the employees of msi a lot of the people we spoke to hadn't even heard of this yet so first thing i did was i called the customer support line the public base and customer support line i did that immediately for msi because i was worried that by the time i called if i had waited a bit then word might have go might have gotten down the chain to say like don't talk to customers about this issue so i called as a customer not as press i spoke to not a press representative not a pr person and i said uh if you missed the beginning of this video it's recapping what i'm talking about now but i i said uh pretended i was a customer of that ebay listing and i said i'm just a customer i'm afraid that i got scammed on ebay i purchased an msi product uh it was a 3080 it was more expensive than it should have been but i really needed it and so i bought the 3080 on ebay and i'm worried i got scammed by a non-genuine reseller of msi products so that was my first step i recorded the call too but we're not doing an upload so we won't i would have probably shoved it into an upload but um that representative immediately went to ebay and checked the listing i sent that representative to we had found this independently but the internet also found it to rebate.msi computer or is it computer i think it's computer no ass at the end dot com and that redirects to these starlits partners website and sent that customer service rep a few different places related to this starlet company selling the cards and my ultimate question was did i get scammed is this is this like an official msi seller now this is a customer service rep who is way down on the chain probably has no idea what the sales people are doing no discredit obviously or disrespect to that person the point being that they are not high enough in the hierarchy of the company to really need to be exposed to the sales data so that stated the customer service rep told me after looking around said no that's not legit that's not us that turned out to not be true i'm not going to blame msi the company for that because i asked as non-media as a customer pretending i was like scared i got scammed so i'm not gonna blame the company for that response but uh that rep said initially that it wasn't a legitimate seller so that gave me a little bit of hope that maybe this was a scam that popped up and it was like extremely elaborate with like fake address or actually a real address but msi's so uh swtf is going on the there was a short version uh msi controversy that msi was selling its own video cards on ebay for double the price that's the short version and so internet was mad as it should be if that's the case because the card was sold at equivalent to scalper prices basically by what appeared to be a sort of a first party is like first party indirectly through some sleuthing people found out uh related to msi but the actual listing i think was under starlight partners that's the story to kind of quickly recap for people in chat so uh yeah ultimately we spoke with people at msi i called msi taiwan and they were not familiar with the matter at the time they called internally eventually they called msi us which will absolutely not talk to me i think i'm pretty sure pretty sure if i went to msi us they would be like uh go screw yourself like because if you haven't seen it we had a video called it was just kill shot kill shot msi kill shot go search msi kill shot gamers nexus you'll see what i'm talking about msi was probably going to be the last company to give me an official statement so we got it publicly but i spoke with people there just not in an official capacity um so yeah the uh um they they definitely hate us after that video i'm sure but the right people that we know at the company uh with whom we've worked for many years they knew that we were just speaking the truth in that video and so they were you know they'll normally talk to us um just not officially with a statement or pr or anything so yeah uh end of the day this is a problem where msi um let's let me pull up their statement again to get the exact phrasing that they used starlet is an individual sales subsidiary working under msi i would say that's probably an accurate statement based on what we've seen i mean obviously it is but in terms of like have they twisted this statement not really that's pretty accurate so starlight partner is part of msi it is uh apparently based at msi's headquarters oh that's what i wanted to explain earlier it's late it's like almost 4 am so i kind of lost track what i wanted to explain earlier wasn't talking about the partners in the industry it is now my understanding that somewhat profoundly it's often one person responsible for the ebay listings at these companies so even if they might have a fairly large sales team it's typically one person doing ebay selling and uh the end result of that is depending on the company that person may have a lot of freedom and independence to just kind of do what they want with the products or they might have to go through multiple layers of management in the case of msi it is it appears to be the case that the person who's doing the ebay stuff is perhaps allowed a little bit too much flexibility on how they develop the ebay listing so they set the price it looks like they set the description and this is msi's responsibility it is msi's mistake msi is offering a return in a refund or a partial refund to cover the difference that's good but this isn't like hand waving that because it's one person it's not somehow msi's fault obviously it is this is obviously a problem and they did say moving forward msi will enforce the strict for policy to avoid situations like this so that's all mostly good it's just unfortunate that happens to begin with uh one person just means easy pr cleanup you have no idea what you're talking about one person is actually the case for the ebay listings for most of these companies and i'll tell you why i know if you call starlet partners support line which we did that line goes to a voicemail and it answers something like hello this is phillip leave a message philip is one that's the company number for support for starlet partners and it's answered by philip who from what we can tell appears to be an msi employee we uh got access to an employee listing and it looks like that may be the case uh can't 100 confirm that like in terms of strictly in terms of the um formal definition of employee of a company that's the part i can't confirm does work for or on behalf of msi can confirm so uh yeah so it is actually uh actually one person handling that now there is management that's involved and it is management's fault as well and it is that person's fault as well uh but just to give you the sense of scale for things that's how it happened typically the way this works is the person who controls the ebay listings will go to a pm or someone else in procurement who's in control of inventory at some level and they then will list that inventory for sale and sometimes that inventory is refurbished stock sometimes it's b stock like a maybe stock that was rejected for a scuff or a bad bin or i don't know maybe it's missing like a phase in the vrm something like that something where it still works but not optimally uh or it could be new inventory too now uh yes someone says or a contractor that's that's exactly what i was getting at when i said uh the official relationship um so let's see their exact statement i want to look at again said um i had some keywords in it i would not be given newly released products i i don't know that i believe this is the part i think is is [ __ ] uh they say as such we have conducted an investigation and found that an error allowed them to access the inventory they were not permitted to handle i don't actually believe that i think that's made up and that's bs i think a lot of the rest of this is probably realistic so as far as like an error allowed them to get access to this inventory and sell it probably what happened is uh the word or the phrase an error actually means a person who works at msi who approved it that's not like i don't think that's a mistake it's it just seems so unlikely that that's a mistake it's probably something that now they decided as a mistake and will not happen again but i don't think it was initially like we should explicitly disallow this and if it happens and that's an error in the program and i don't think that's really as simple as it was so um yeah i think that uh that should kind of wrap up most of the story i'm trying to keep an eye on everything yeah people laughing at the investigation phrasing from msi i think that is um that is probably uh a little bit overplaying what actually happened i think there was like it's not like there was some big fbi internal investigation i think someone looked at the ebay listing looked at reddit looked at twitter said huh that's not good let's what do we do to reverse that like quick get all the pr people on the phone uh so yeah i don't think uh i think they're kind of overplaying some things a bit i do think that there was uh quite a bit of bs with the error part of the statement i think that the solution which was refunds permitted partial refunds permitted i think that's a good solution i don't think that would have happened without the outrage so and and msi if it's statement is to believe uh the people in charge wouldn't have noticed if not for the outrage so it is there's give and get here uh all right let me look at the chat see what's going on so a couple things i guess i will kind of note i i do think that um someone says imagine being an msi shill i mean did you look at our video where we buried their dragon like in the ground and then i proceeded to present emails from five years ago that damned them to uh like a complete lack of trust from anybody i i don't know i mean anyone who's seen our content knows the deal uh all right this is a good question let me try and catch it before it scrolls up where is it see so steve how much of it is msi us and how much is msi in general excellent question uh so like a lot of the companies in the industry msi has multiple branches and it has multiple companies that are all sort of in some either connected to or underneath microstar international cooler master is a good example there's cooler master there's cooler master americas there's like a cooler master arm that does industry so there's a lot of different branches it's a question of how much of it is msi versus msi us msi headquarters is in taipei we've been there we've done videos there actually most of the decisions from the companies come from their hq so for the board partners almost universally that's going to be in uh in taiwan and taipei so like gigabyte msi i don't evga doesn't even j's got a lot of u.s uh presence and independence um but definitely gigabyte msi asus uh they have a taiwan headquarters then they have a us branch often the u.s branch will handle things like u.s media relations it'll handle u.s marketing uh the u.s branches are responsible for explaining to the headquarters like here's how our region behaves so they might say this is how the press works in our region or this is how the um the buyers respond this is the type of product they like to buy this is how much they often spend so that's kind of what the us brands will typically do often sales support warranty stuff like that and potentially call centers will be in the branch local to the region that it's representing so hq in this case for msi makes most of the decisions that drive the company and then the us branch if it worked the way it's supposed to which i don't think it does but the us branch's job should be to push back on hq and say no you're doing this wrong this isn't how us media works like and this isn't how uh this isn't like how the market will respond to the product so ideally that's what happens gigabyte does a really good job of this where each of the regions has pretty much independent control over its own region so you can allow the experts of each region because all the markets are different the average income is different you allow each region to to sort of dictate how things work so that's some behind the scenes how stuff works um all right any elements who fundraise rip slack kanzi from uh pr captain planet and then uh johnny sm i'm not trying to read all the super chats like i said earlier said um i got my paycheck today here's a bit of support from serbia oh cool it's always really cool to see people from around the world watching uh it's morning here 10 a.m so i got to check this live stream thanks for the recap yeah i'm not trying to make this take forever you know this isn't like a high quality news video for us we could produce it all i could go through all of the pdfs and documents that the internet produced the end of the day i've got other stuff to do and it was really late but we wanted to get this out there so that frankly so that we could just kind of we being gian could just kind of like move on from the story do our coverage of it and i get back to what i need to do so that's the wrap uh will this delay msi's official release i'm not sure just trying to see if there's any other important questions uh i think really the the thing that i need to sort of emphasize here is uh taking the the balanced approach to this type of controversy where like outrage a bit of it is definitely important because that's how you get movement uh certainly got msi to react quickly there's not that many customers think they're like four items sold from that listing i don't know how many others there were there could have been more but um those people are do have an option it sounds like to get refunded and hopefully msi follows through on that uh so the the little bit of outrage does get that reaction i think that sometimes in the community just speaking frankly it goes like super overboard to the extent that it's just like it's it's blowing up everything and no one really has enough time to dig in and research it and that's not great in this case the interesting thing is that because of how popular it was and because of the timing which for the most part unfortunately that's why i'm doing a live stream instead of a film to upload because of the timing i was able to call taiwan headquarters and speak to the right people and and they were like uh we didn't know this was happening like what do we do so they they put in motion the things that needed to get done to get that statement out as quickly as it was um so anyway is there anything else that once you can't leave i need reasons to continue not working uh anything else how many cards were sold that i'm not 100 positive except for what ebay tells us ebay i think said four i think it said four sold and zero available but that's for one listing i don't know if they had multiple listings or not um do you this is a good one do you think nvidia will be satisfied by msi's statement great question nvidia is pretty vindictive i would say towards partners in general and i mean we've shown like uh it doesn't matter but nvidia will will typically react very very uh let's go with like an iron fist in some scenarios but then they tend to back off once everyone's at an agreement of like okay this is what really happened and sorry we won't do it again uh it is a bit of the trouble with how large nvidia is and how it's like kind of approaching the point where the partners don't have much say but in this instance it works out well because nvidia is able to threaten or or promise to punish the partners who do things that are actually bad obviously so one thing that's important for everyone to know is that the manufacturers can't dictate a price that has suggested price most of the time people stick close to it so it can't really dictate a price like uh a company would not be able to go to an amazon third-party seller or i don't know best buy for example even unless they have some sort of other agreement but wouldn't be able to go to them and say no you can't sell this for 750 you have to sell it for 700. uh so that's actually not legal in the us to do it that way um but uh what nvidia and msi and everyone else can do is use sort of the threat of competition to keep the prices where they're supposed to be and they can use rebates and incentive programs and do enough to kind of keep the prices in a fixed area okay where do we find the statement put out by msi let me put that on the screen one more time and also if you would like to see it yourself it is on twitter.com msi usa i don't know if it's case sensitive i don't think it matters lowercase homicide capital usa does it's lee that's where you can get the official statement so anyway that's the deal um my thoughts to just recap those i think this was a screw-up and i also don't think it's the end of the world we have been extremely heavy-handed with msi in the past i am not afraid of saying what i think here which is that i think the community overreacted but i do think that a lot of the initial reaction was justified i just the way it kind of spiraled into a snowball made of pitchforks was a little bit much and aggressive and the problem is it starts to put pressure on media and personalities where people are going to respond without all the details so like if we made a video before that statement came out sure we we could have guessed at that and that was kind of direction i was leaning but it wouldn't have beneficial so what's the point um so yeah i do think there was a little bit of overkill by the community i also think that msi screwed up and i think that part of msi's statement is [ __ ] uh but i also i do find the solution which is offering the refunds to people and the um partial refund people i think that's a good solution at least so yeah msi's got a msi's got a lot of things it needs to fix at the company and this is not terribly surprising that it happened but again i am going to give them the benefit of the fact that we're talking about uh basically one person controlling the ebay listings i already talked about how we know that and uh they probably got a location it sounds like they got either b stock or maybe msi says an error allowed them to get new stock not really clear on what the stock was but they got some stock and they sold it for way too much money and they thought this will be great it'll really make our profits look good our margins will be insane and i'll be recognized for it unfortunately that was exactly the wrong decision to make especially right now totally tone deaf to the to the industry totally tone deaf to the discussion of lack of inventory the scalping the price of inventory really bad look for msi and potentially for nvidia which will piss on video off um so yeah you know there's uh definitely mostly bad but i don't think necessarily as like msi's orchestrating this huge evil thing i don't think it was that far and i think you all know from our previous video that if i did think it's that far i would tell you so that's the recap i am going to read a couple more chats and then we're gonna close out because it is now 3 58 a.m and you know this isn't like a formal news video for us but hopefully it kind of gets our one up to speed right about 30 minutes though and i think i've i've i've more than repeated myself at this point man it's a little bit rambly but that's what you get with a story like this i guess i'll say this too so from purely our um our perspective working on this just if you're curious if you care but uh we were looking at i might say we i mean me i was the only one working here at this point so i was looking at uh i need to get two to three videos filmed for my team tomorrow so that my team has work tomorrow so that they can produce content and get paid tomorrow i also really want to address this thing and i feel a lot of responsibility and like duty to the audience to address topics like this as quickly as we can and as accurately as we can so we waited to get all the information uh and at that by the time we got all the information i looked at the clock and i was like there's no way i i'm going to have to leave at 8 or 9 a.m if i film edit script a video because i don't have a team here obviously at this time so if you're curious about the decision making that was basically it where i said all right we can either not make a video not discuss this at all or we can do a live stream uh because the other there's no other option i have to film other things after i get off camera here and work on some other content that we're gonna be editing tomorrow for the uploads all right that's it uh so someone says i was listening to this thinking it's an upload no it is in fact live i just wanted to get through it quickly um and uh you know as accurately as we could while also being quick so my apologies that it's not up to our normal news video production standards but yeah it was either this or nothing at this point so just because of the timing of everything okay jared's text says do it live that's that's what we did uh i'm gonna catch a couple super chats then close it out uh andre fuson says avid you and ovidue and i are happy to see you live here in romania thank you once again very cool to see people from everywhere tim seeley no message uh see bobby says is the shortage of the new nvidia cards because of a shortage of chips from nvidia ultimately yes it's definitely not just because of like the um uh the cooler manufacturing for sure it's it's um gpu silicon this is definitely one of the issues maybe memory too but for sure gpu silicon let's see how are the captions generated before he even speaks i have no idea but whatever that technology is i need it so i don't need to write scripts anymore it'll just be done for me i'll just think at the computer and it'll be done uh let's see trying to catch a couple of these before i sign off storm gc10 any idea which 3080 3090 coolers are performing the best a little bit of an idea that gigabyte eagle did okay but really terrible overclocker unfortunately uh i say terrible like it's it's okay but it's below average and there's not much ability to do more unfortunately and the 30 90s we're just starting to look at so we'll have a video about those soon i've got the evga one ready to go at this point we just need to kind of qc it and upload it so okay i'm i'm gonna close it out there i mean yeah thanks thanks for watching uh i hope that this was somewhat useful to you and if not then sorry check the uploads later all right i'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 215,288

Rating: 4.941318 out of 5

Keywords: rtx 3080, nvidia rtx 3080, evga rtx 3080 ftw3, asus rtx 3080 tuf, gigabyte rtx 3080 eagle

Id: aCVKdt-6Qz4

Length: 35min 11sec (2111 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Professional_Stewart]

With the state of the 30 series cards and stock levels, the biggest thing that indicates something funky is going on... Why did they even have cards in the inventory to list on eBay? Everything is and has been sold out for how long now?

And yet Starlit Partners had inventory to list and MSI didn't know?

Right.

[u/gasmaskdude]

Is it considered scalping if an authorized retailer sells the cards with an outrageous markup?

[u/Spycrabgineer]

I dont even give a shit if this is intentional or not, as long as you admit starlink is your subsidiary then MSI need to sort their shit out regardless.

and i have a very fucking hard time believing the refurb department can have access to the hottest stock in their warehouse without anyone supervising notices. Seriously i think anyone who worked at a warehouse will know that it is near impossible unless their supervisors are incompetent.

edit : seriously , for all this to be an accident all these has to happen :

1. take the plank of 3080/3090s from the main warehouse (forklift driver / unpacking workers / stock check)
2. list prices on ebay (the one who evaluate cards since they are only subsidiary for dealing with refurbs and they should have guidelines on how much to list for what defects )
3. get the stock from their shelves
4. attach shipping label to the individual stock

all these steps without anyone noticing thats not what they usually do since they are only "subsidiary for refurbished stock" and speaking up ?

[u/MOCAMBO]

Don't think I'll be buying MSI after this.

[u/kneeb0y_]

Just stop supporting this company. Simple.

[u/Mintykanesh]

I find it very hard to believe it wasn't intentional. With all the pressure they'd be under from Nvidia and retailers I'm sure MSI would have a close eye on their stock and where it's going.

[u/APKenna]

MSI Statement

[u/kosh56]

Fuck MSI. I don't think people who knowingly bought from scalpers deserve to get a refund though.

[u/destiny2sk]

ah... msi... when Nvidia can't send you enough 3080 chips for your business, you turn around and scalp the consumers on ebay !

it's an Nvidia chip afterall, MSI could be blacklisted pretty fast !