I was thinking about this for the past year. Basically NVIDIA and other gaming chips were being sold by scalpers for huge profits and NVIDIA said they didn't have enough capacity. But the question is why didn't NVIDIA just charge more if they had a shortage of supply....
Well, once the dust settled that's exactly what they did with the 40 series. The launch MSRP of the 4080 was almost double that of the 3080, and most other cards also had significant increases in MSRP. It has caused some amount of backlash for sure but the market has more or less accepted it.
In any case, not long after the 40 series launched the AI boom went into full gear and Nvidia once again found themselves selling shovels in a gold rush, so consumer GPU pricing quickly became an academic issue as far as Nvidia's profits were concerned.
