Rabid gamers who MUST have that 1440Hz refresh may be willing to pay anything for their space heaters, but there are people who play games but aren't willing to spend 1K (or 3K, how far have they gone these days?) on a video card.
In other words, is this done to increase sales volume or just nvidia's profit?
What if it’s neither? Nvidia tried increasing production of 1070s and 1080s three years ago to meet bitcoin demand, and it bit them hard when the bitcoin bubble suddenly popped. They got stuck with an oversupply of cards right when Turing was launching, it ate into sales and the stock dropped in half overnight. Meanwhile their customer base of gamers were pissed because they couldn’t get gaming cards. What if they’re just hedging against another bubble popping, and trying to avoid getting killed by it, again?
In 2017 everyone was buying GTX 10XX cards, on one hand because they actually represented a good improvement over the last generation for a change, but mostly due to the crypto bubble. Which then burst at the beginning of 2018.
Then RTX 20XX came along, which actually represented a slight drop in price/performance if you don't count the raytracing/AI cores (which to this day hardly matter in gaming), while used GTX 10XX cards were still everywhere.
So now nvidia wants to make sure cards used for crypto go straight to the landfill after the current bubble bursts.
I just checked and my 1050Ti costs new about 30% more than what I paid for it 2 or 3 years ago...