NVIDIA RTX 4060 sales leak claims GPU is a launch flop like the 4060 Ti

NVIDIA's RTX 4060 graphics card is reportedly struggling for sales right out of the gate, or so we hear from sources in Japan and Europe.

For starters, take a look at the above tweet. It shows a shop in the Japanese Akihabara shopping hub that didn't even bother to open for the launch, and a second store that was open for business.

The latter had a launch day queue of... wait for it... one keen gamer. No, technically a single person isn't a queue, but you get the point. The interest level in Japan was pretty low, then, we can guess.

(You may recall that the exact same scenario unfurled with the launch of the RTX 4060 Ti - just one gamer turned up at the Akihabara hub - and that GPU clearly hasn't sold well since, either).

The other news on the RTX 4060 sales front comes from 3D Center, a German tech site that regularly keeps track of elements of sales in that country. We're told that the first day's sales from MindFactory, a major German retailer, totaled just 10 units. Yes, you read that right: 10, spelled t-e-n; we didn't miss off a zero here.

As 3D Center observes, day-one sales of a few hundred could be regarded as 'mediocre,' so 10 is, well, pretty tragic.

How bizarre

This is bizarrely low sounding, to be honest. Yes, we get that a lot of folks aren't happy with the RTX 4060, you only have to look at opinions and reviews online - but it's far from a bad graphics card. (It scored a 'recommended' in our review, as you may have seen).

It may be less-than-ideal in some respects, but we previously figured that it might be decently popular. Mainly based on the poor reaction to the RTX 4060 Ti, which we expected really, given the price. Indeed, we theorized that part of the lackluster 4060 Ti sales was down to folks passing on that model and waiting for the RTX 4060.

That doesn't appear to be the case, though, and at least initially, the 4060 seems to be just as unpopular as its faster stablemate.

What's going on here, then? Is this a reflection of the broader sentiment of gamers turning against NVIDIA, after a whole lot of pricing aggro being thrown their way for what seems like forever (in terms of MSRPs for Lovelace, and stock shortage-fueled price hikes with Ampere). Combined with cost-of-living pains that are making folks look at discounted last-gen GPUs, as we recently heard (see: Practically no one's buying NVIDIA RTX 4000 or AMD RDNA 3 GPUs).

Perhaps, but it's still very early days yet, so we shouldn't declare the RTX 4060 dead and buried on day two of its existence. Still, the way things look at first glance is certainly a bit of a shocker.

Let's see how sales fare over the next few weeks, and whether we get the GPU dropping below MSRP, as no doubt we'll be hearing more from the usual leakers and rumor-mongers.