Remember mid 90's RAM prices? Suddenly, prices dropped. What happened?

I was remembering how expensive simms used to be in the early-mid 90's, and then suddenly prices started dropping. Not slowly, it was like a giant meteorite made out of RAM slammed into the planet and now we have it all over the place just on the ground, so pricing had to drastically go down. What happened exactly? Was it a patent that got invalidated or expired? Was it just a new series of companies getting into the memory game?