Like Freedom said they do exist to make their customers happy. In fact, that is the pillar of their success and hence the very reason of their existence. Pleasing their shareholders* is part of their duty, but price gouging, supply and demand control and other monopolistic/duopolistic tactics are not part of their duty and are illegal in most places afaik.
* They are NOT forced to please shareholders at any cost BTW. Shareholders can opt to buy and sell their shares and have some voting privileges as to what happens in the company, but that's far, really far from saying that the company has to do anything they can to please them. The only duty that the management is really forced to fullfill is ensuring an ongoing bussiness. (and alienating your customers is fastest way to ensure the opposite)
If the practices are illegal, they'll be punished, in some way. But, if it's happening, it's more likely that it's
not illegal, simply a grey area, that's why large companies have a large staff of lawyers on the payroll, in the form of legal departments. They're there to make sure nothing blatantly illegal is done by the executives.
They are obligated to increase the value of their stock, if possible, to increase shareholder returns. Not doing so could result in executive firings, eventually. This is the responsibility of a board of directors, who choose a Chief executive, who then chooses other executives, who are all beholden to the board of directors, who are themselves
legally beholden to the shareholders. The shareholders own the company. It may take time, but the shareholders can and do have the power to make sweeping changes to a company, if a majority of them want it done.
Ultimately, without having all the information available, concerning pricing decisions and all the rationale that went into those pricing decisions, it's pointless to ascribe any kind of wrongdoing to any company. If there is some kind of illegality at work, it is most likely either something extremely obscure and legally arcane or simply in a 'grey area' where there are no specific prohibitions, otherwise it would have been immediately flagged as a problem by AMD's legal department.
So,
Supply and demand. Charge high, until competition forces you to reduce prices, until then, collect the profit, please the shareholders. The reality is that Nvidia releasing one card, even if it is high end and slightly outperforms the top AMD card, hasn't been enough for AMD to decide to lower prices across the board for their new gpu line. Sounds to me like the usual business person's ploy to make as much money as possible, when it's possible to make the most amount of money.
We may not like it, and think it's unfair, and then go on to rant about how it's somehow illegal and/or unethical and 'bad form', but it happens all the time, everywhere, in every economic domain.
Enough already.
EDIT:
Meanwhile, on Newegg, all the GTX680s are sold out, and the entire line of AMD 7000 series gpus are available.
Looks like they made the right economic decision for their company, and are currently maximizing their profits.
