Can't it be both? Seems like a win-win for Nvidia and gamers.
I can genuinely see a company like Nvidia getting a lot of customer feedback and maybe employees actually caring that gamers can get their hands on Nvidia's cards.
I can genuinely see a company like Nvidia getting a lot of customer feedback and maybe employees actually caring that gamers can get their hands on Nvidia's cards.
For miners, they just want whatever does more hashes per second. There's no loyalty there and the hardware is competing solely on hash/power/cost. For gaming, you have proprietary software and APIs like "RTX"-branded stuff, game-specific driver optimizations, etc. where you can better defend yourself against AMD.
So for Nvidia, if they're going to sell X GPUs either way, they'd rather sell to gamers than miners to help preserve their gaming market share which plausibly has more long-term value. Just my guess, at least.