Are they doing it to get a bigger cut of miners' funds? Or to try to find a way to keep the pipeline for designing, building, and coding for gaming GPUs flowing?
It made them a lot of money, but they (rightly so) look at it as margin that could evaporate tomorrow. And in the mean time pisses their core users off (through volume availability issues) and makes an already difficult production -> retail supply chain even more bursty.
So how do you deal with that? Well, a not-terrible way is artificially segmenting your market. Crypto folks, over here in this pool with huge waves. Everyone else, back to business as usual.
Miners would probably find a way to use that new entrant's GPUs for mining too.
I think the real threat is that mining could chill the gaming industry as a whole. Either by pricing tons of people out of gaming so they find new hobbies and maybe never come back, or by influencing the direction of game development away from advanced graphics. If most gamers can't afford top-end GPUs anymore, then the perceived value of [Latest Game] having the most photorealistic graphics yet could be flipped into the negative by a change in gamer culture.
It's not a coincidence the software lockout landed right as Nvidia released an unlocked mining card without a display output ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ ). And since it doesn't have a display output, all those used mining cards become ewaste instead of something that cuts into nvidia's revenue.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/CMP-170HX-price-double-RTX-3...
No, they are trying to piss off the miners so that their actual customers (gamers) have a chance of getting GPUs again.
It's like the first Bitcoin craze many years ago when the first CUDA miners came out - you could not find any GPU anywhere because people bought them for mining. Gamers were pissed as the miners outbid them everywhere. Once ASICs came out, the complete GPU market crashed - suddenly there was a massive supply of second-hand GPUs from miners... the gamers snatched these up, and NVIDIA suddenly had the problem that their new GPU sales crashed.
The only difference is that this time it isn't Bitcoin anymore but a whole bunch of random shitcoins.