I always plan my upgrades to go smoothly. Availability and price are a non issue in that sense.
If the price isn't right and/or the product isn't available, I'm not planning an upgrade. Pretty simple really. I'm not a slave to commerce and the level of PC I'm upgrading for is far beyond 'needs' and firmly in the 'wants' category.
The 'needs' category is what an employer is for. I think much the same applies to small and 1 man businesses... so bottom line I really don't see any problems tbh, except #firstworldproblems.
While I see where you're coming from, that's a rather odd understanding of "planning", necessarily including changing your plans dramatically and on relatively short notice depending on market conditions. How can you know well in advance if pricing is going to be right or availability will be there? Of course previously we have been able to assume this to be okay at most times, but that's obviously changed now. A lot of people were planning to buy a $699 3080 after it was announced (or a $499 3070), yet have been entirely unable to do so. There are clear limits to how much one can plan for, after all. Saying "If the price isn't right and/or the product isn't available, I'm not planning an upgrade." assumes these things can be known beforehand, and I assume you aren't actually prescient, so either you would then be retroactively denying having ever made a plan, or you would have been forced to change your plans by outside forces. Obviously starting from a privileged position like what you describe makes being flexible with planning easier, but it doesn't negate the effects of outside forces on planning and decisionmaking.
I doubt that's it at this time of uncertainty, I don't think that anyone rational would buy a heavily overpriced GPU unless they're very stable financially. Can't say I wasn't tested for an ASUS Rog Strix RTX 3080 that was selling for 700€ on ebay though this isn't overpriced. I was thinking of getting it for the new build, but I gave up, and the total of 8 pieces were sold in like 15 minutes. I decided to wait more, enticipating AM5 platform with DDR5 support, and I'm still hoping that GPU and overall hardware prices will return to something reasonable by then, if they don't well, I'll just wait another year.
Pretty stupid times to get back into gaming, like me after a 1 year pause.
That is definitely the case for a lot of people, but sales numbers definitely say otherwise. As an example, unemployment in the US has been between 7-8% in recent months. That's high, but that still leaves >90% of the workforce employed. A lot of those still employed will of course either be suffering a lot of insecurity due to the possibility of losing their jobs or from others around them doing so (or just from reduced hours etc.), but in a high income country like the US where a large portion of the population has a lot of disposable income and is suddenly in lockdown, it's still reasonable to predict an uptick in high-cost at-home devices. That obviously doesn't change just how horrible this situation has been and continues to be for the still large proportion of the population that have been struck by this in some way, but another depressing part of this equation is that low-income households are by far the most likely to be harmed by this, as they typically have both the least job security, the highest risk of falling ill, and the worst healthcare. But they are also the least likely to be buying DIY PCs to begin with. If anything, crises like the current one highlights and exacerbates class distinctions and economic disparity.
im not playing there game, id like a new gpu but i can wait untill i can get one on my terms, my 1080 is still very usable i dont need the latest and greatest honist.
I've been in that boat since ... 2018? I bought my Fury X planning for a 3+ year life-span and have continuously found good reasons to hold off - and I'm extremely happy with how long it's lasted me - but obviously this supply crunch is coming at pretty much the worst possible time. I've been holding off playing a few games for a year or more in anticipation of a GPU upgrade (I want Control and Metro Exodus with RT, among other things), so the pieces were finally coming together for me ... until they suddenly disappeared
I voted "No upgrades planned, thankfully". Speaking as someone who's been PC gaming 33 years, I think I've reached the stage where if 99.5% of my +2,000 games will run on a GTX 1660 and it's just that last 0.5% that don't, and due to ongoing circumstances prices for making the latter work are spiralling to absurd degrees combined with frame-rates in newer games disproportionately falling off 75% compared to even fairly recent 2016-2017 titles like Doom or Prey often with not that much to show for it, then they have to be pretty damn special to convince me they are worth upgrading for and to be honest CyberBug 2077 and a few other 2018-2020 titles like Control simply aren't. I don't hate them, but for some reason they just don't "click" with me anywhere near what older titles like Witcher 3, Skyrim or Deus Ex did.
I've lost all interest in Call of Duty 723 and "Far Cry 3: Annual Retexture Pack 6" due to "Franchise Fatigue", and looking through my collection, everything bought post 2018 were were Indie's like Dusk, DARQ, The Pedestrian, Supraland, Desperados 3, etc. I've already upgraded everything else (new monitor, laser printer, 2TB SSD, etc, last year). Needless to say, this has allowed me to step outside of the mindless upgrade rat-race, and here I am playing games I actually enjoy the most like The Talos Principle on a lowly GTX 1660 with smooth +100 frame-rates, and am increasingly seeing "I need a £1,000 GPU for playable frame-rates at 1080p on the newest unfinished buggy as hell AAA" as far more of a software than hardware problem (as in "games devs can't optimise for sh*t and I'm done with 'rewarding' that even without hardware availability / pricing issues").
I agree with a lot of what you're saying here, though as mentioned above there are still
some AAA titles I want to play. I'm also in the bind of having a 1440p monitor (which looks
terrible at 1080p, for the record - it likely has a garbage scaler given that it's from 2011) which does somewhat force my hand into higher end GPUs (or playing at 720p for 4:1 scaling). I'm actually hoping to get a 4k monitor in part due to the ability to run it at 1080p with 4:1 scaling - I use my monitor for work (lots and lots of on-screen text) so going below 1440p 27" is out of the question due to that, though for a pure gaming setup I'd probably want something like a 32" 1080p monitor. I bought my current GPU planning to keep it for a long time, and I plan for the same with the next upgrade, it's just that the timing right now couldn't be much worse for me, as I've reached the point where my GPU is very clearly a hindrance. I could of course upgrade to a lower-end GPU, which would still dramatically outperform my current one, but I don't want to mostly due to the much worse longevity of such a purchase.
