They are not wrong, it’s that perspectives have shifted now that people have a little more emotional distance from a beloved corporation shutting down and the ayyymd pitchfork brigades have moved onto the next bandwagon.

Evga was a badly run business in many many ways. All the things that endeared them to customers, like warranty, step up, etc were things that pushed down evga’s margins too. And then unlike all the other partners they outsourced manufacturing (in addition to coolers which everyone outsources) so basically evga’s entire role was signing checks and approving warranty claims (partners don’t even do binning nowadays, they come pre binned). And as a result they didn’t make much money, even among partners. It is the business equivalent of "my boss pays me so little that after I pay for my kids' private school, I can barely even afford to eat [out every night]!"

Partners grumble but nobody else is quitting the business over it. A car dealership doesn’t make the same margin as ford or GM (because they don't add the same amount of value to the product), and obviously they all wish they did, but it’s a reliable margin. And people forget that partners/OEMs have their own bundling going on too etc - MSI doesn't sell most of its GPUs at retail etc, they go into laptops and prebuilts, and they make fat margins on that too (even if they don't make great margins on the DIY market sales). NVIDIA isn't the only one who has another market angle which justifies running low margins on the actual product assembly. EVGA simply doesn't have the scale or the distribution channels to play with the big dogs anymore.

On top of that the evga ceo was involved in all kinds of side ventures like motherboards and monitors and sound cards (actual pcie sound cards in 2020) and a line of (falsely-advertised) video capture boxes they got scammed on by a fly-by-night vendor, and these ate up all of evga’s profits too.

And now it is also coming out there was some deal where NVIDIA would pay off a bunch of EVGA's debts, in return for shifting a bunch of volume for them at the lowest margins? EVGA has been hemorrhaging money for a long time, and maybe this is the reason EVGA was always the one at MSRP, because they were "getting payment up front" for those cards, in return for paying off these debts.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/xgn7do/we_need_more...

https://youtu.be/vyQxNN9EF3w?t=5044

Basically: evga quit the business because of the impending post-mining slump and the ceo realizing he was getting too old for this shit and leaving. And it was his personal, privately owned business and very much his personal fief (and like many business owners he was very much an egotistical asshole, see the 23% approval rating on Glassdoor etc, that's extraordinarily low for a mature tech business). So he just opted to fire everyone and shut it down.

Dude basically mismanaged his business into the ground, eating up all the profits from what everyone else finds to be a fairly lucrative distribution venture (low margin but high volume, and complimentary to other OEM ventures) via all these money-losing side projects, then ran crying to sympathetic tech media. Even in the original video, steve tells you to "take it with a grain of salt" and that ended up being far more true than he knew it to be at the moment.

On top of the broader anti-nvidia bandwagon/circlejerk in general, gamers have a well-earned reputation for not consuming media very critically - like, obviously the 23%-approval CEO says he didn't mismanage his business and that it's not his fault he's shuttering it and laying everyone off, why would he just get up on TV and lie? In front of [tech] Jesus and everything???? If the low margins are because of a big up-front cash payment of EVGAs debts he'd obviously have to say that, right?

That's where gamers are with media literacy in 2024. Still failing the "buster test". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0LTbwR--9c

I don't get why it's so hard to make the connection that the company with the suspiciously-generous warranty (in a post-mining era), and step-up policy, and other extraordinarily-generous business practices, who outsourced everything, might not have been particularly financially stable for its own internal reasons. Of course you look prosperous - you're spending like a drunken sailor, and that's all anyone from the outside can see!

No, must have been nvidia. Just like costs can't really be going up across the board, even for AMD - no, it has to be NVIDIA, and AMD is just choosing to follow them and gouge etc. People don't want to make the connections between these points because it would disrupt the nvidia hatewagon. Just like the Crysis 2 tessellation thing, and "selling directly to miners", and a million others - people are parasocially attached to hating NVIDIA, and it doesn't matter if any number of individual hatewagons are debunked, the narrative remains the same. Green man bad, we just have to figure out why and how.

https://old.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/3vppv1/crysis_2_t...

https://twitter.com/dylan522p/status/1332502890104188929

https://paulgraham.com/fh.html