[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/intel/5CSEBA6U23I...
Edit: it was erroneous of me to state the board was being sold at a loss, rather I meant that the board was being definitely being subsidized by companies such as Intel and their partners such as Panasonic. My mistake. I also wasn't meaning to convey that the consumer Digikey pricing was the same as the large volume manufacturers such as Terasic. Rather I meant to demonstrate and agree with the OP on the astounding situation that MiSTer currently exists in, owning to the lack of economic viability for someone to produce a low volume commercial FPGA emulation machine for a niche audience without any subsidization.
A better way to approach this is as follows: what’s the die size of an FPGA like this? What’s the production cost of the die? Then check the historic gross margin percentage of FPGA companies. Xilinx is around 68%, and that includes high-end products which carry the highest markups, unlike this cookie cutter thing.
That should give you a good ballpark number.
DigiKey charges what they do because nobody else is willing to sell these things in low volume, and they have very high inventory costs.
Anyone who thinks that Terasic sells these at a loss doesn’t have a clue about volume pricing of FPGAs. And as a special Intel partner, there’s little doubt that Terasic has access to this kind of pricing.