Nvidia's Pricing Rules Forced EVGA to Sell Cards at a Loss

A former EVGA employee has shed light on the reasons behind the company's decision to leave Nvidia in 2022. Brendon Ray Hedrick, who worked at EVGA from February 2016 to December 2019, claims that Nvidia's pricing rules forced EVGA to sell some GeForce cards at a loss just to stay visible at the manufacturer's advertised starting price.

Hedrick described a pricing structure where EVGA felt obligated to keep at least one GeForce card available at Nvidia's advertised MSRP, even when that specific model generated little to no profit and, in some cases, reportedly caused a loss. These entry-level cards functioned as loss leaders: they kept EVGA visible at the price point Nvidia had publicly promoted, while pricier, higher-margin cards further up the stack were supposed to make up the difference.

The pressure intensified during the RTX 20-series generation, when EVGA was sometimes required to sell cheaper cards with minimal profit while leaning on higher-priced models to keep the business afloat. The recurring theme is Nvidia's Founders Edition line: reference cards sold directly by Nvidia that increasingly competed with the same partners who were building around Nvidia's own silicon.

The timeline of events reveals that EVGA's relationship with Nvidia had been strained for years, and the company's public exit in 2022 was not a sudden rupture but the end point of a slow squeeze that insiders saw coming. Hedrick's account reframes the breakup as a structural problem that employees inside the company could see years before it became public.