AMD’s New 9070 GPU Feels Like a Bad Decoy Product

Don’t fall for these old pricing tricks!

I’ve been a member of AMD’s “Team Red” as a Radeon 6800XT owner for the last four years, and as a result I’ve missed out on a lot of cool graphics features. Photo taken by the author.

After suddenly skipping the announcement of their new graphics cards a few months ago at CES, AMD has finally rolled out all the details about their upcoming RDNA 4 GPUs, with a launch to follow later this week.

They’ll have the robust and potentially very exciting 9070 XT for $600, and its smaller hacked-down brother the 9070 at $550.

Uh oh, this is no good.

Right away, even without diving into their complete specs, the cheaper card looks like a “decoy product,” an ancient marketing technique used to gently drive customers into spending more money. The thinking is that you stack your lineup with products that represent objectively worse values in the hopes of pushing your users to the models that you actually want them to spend money on, thus maximizing sales of your highest-profit items.

The tech industry tries this all the time across so many different sectors. I spent many years reviewing headphones, and this sort of pricing is the foundation of every single audio product lineup. It’s also the same thinking behind the “Best Value” pricing on different coffee sizes or mobile game currency packs.