Where do you live? Because Intel Arc cards ARE available at MSRP almost everywhere in western nations. It really isn't a paper launch.

Latvia, when it released over here it was around 350 EUR for a LE B580, not from an individual scalper but a regular e-commerce store that sells all sorts of parts. For comparison's sake, a regular RTX 3060 12 GB (not Ti) was 300 EUR around that time.

In other countries, any place that sold them at near-MSRP very much was out of stock immediately (not that there was that much of it to begin with, which is my critique), leaving other vendors to raise the prices to around 350 USD and the more greedy ones and scalpers all the way up to 400 USD, I saw those listings myself:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/where-to-buy...

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-arc-b580-out-o...

Whether anyone actually bought those is another question entirely, but a GPU that's only available to you at 350 USD but should have been sold for 250 USD (and performs well for that price) is just plainly bad value.

It is nice that since the prices have dropped, however the hype around it is already past, so we're in the long tail of the product's lifecycle, especially with things like the CPU driver overhead being identified and getting lots of negative press. They had a chance to move a lot of units at launch thanks to positive reviews from pretty much everyone... and they fumbled it.

To be fair to the parent they absolutely were a paper launch. Looks like supply has finally caught up now but we’re also a long way from launch.