The GTX 1070 launched in June 2016 with an MSRP of $379. Typical prices at the end of 2018 for that same product are above $400 even after the newer RTX 2000 series has launched.

I and pretty much every other PC gamer I know have been holding off buying upgrades until prices come back to some level of sanity. I don't understand how Nvidia (and EVGA, XFX, MSI, Zotac, Gigabyte, etc) can keep trying to sell at these absurd prices then turn around and complain about how not enough people are buying them or they don't make enough money.

Have their costs unexpectedly shot up on their two-year-old manufacturing processes? Or did they just bank on the crypto bubble to prop up inflating GPU prices forever and were surprised when it didn't happen?

Going forward they've doubled down on even higher prices for next generation, with versions of the RTX 2070 currently at $500 to $600.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/video-card/#gpu.chipse...

EDIT - I should add, my first thought on this was that gamers are no longer a market that Nvidia cares about, and they're hoping that high prices will still sell to the machine learning (where people are frequently spending someone else's money on a large quantity of cards) and cryptocurrency markets. Then crypto dropped out, and ML are considering other options even if Nvidia are the top performers.

But the RTX series is pitched for realtime raytracing effects in upcoming games, which sends the message that they do take gaming seriously. But I think they're out of touch with how much people are willing to spend on it.