All true .... the people doing the complaining have only themselves to blame. Well perhaps not exactly only.
a) The *need* to be the 1st one on the block to have the new shiny thing is, in the social media age, believed to be a way to increase one social standing is the primary driver of the price structure. At the time of release, yields are the lowest they will be in the production cycle, demand far exceeds supply and ... forget nVidia.... think of all all the resellers who still have to pay rent, taxes, employees, utilities and all other soft costs. When supply exceeds demand, then they can sell as many cards as they want, pricing based upon what the competition is charging and how fast they are going out the door. If they sell 1,000 cards in a week, have a $20 markup over their costs, they make $20k to put against those costs with some left over for profit (hopefully). But if they have cards sitting on the shelves, they are not making anything .... they still gotta pay those bills. If they get an allocation of 200 cards ... then they need to charge $100 markup to pay those same bills ... and they will continues to do that and more until they stop flying out the door.
b) Yes, it's a fiduciary responsibility of all corporate officers to maximize profits. Officers can be fired and even prosecuted for failing to maximize stockholder profits provided of course actions that would violate law, contract, policy or long term goals.
c) Competition ... the least real competition they had at the top end was themselves .... Nvidia realized they can make more money selling the top tier cards than 2 lower tier cards, so they nerfed SLI at resolutions lower than 4k so their premium pricing at the top end no longer suffered from competition from twin 2nd tier cards. With the power of SLI being negated, support by game developers fizzled.
