Your example isn't the same. The manufacturers wouldn't be able to do enough volume to bring down card prices for AI without gamers. The gamers are actually bringing your price down.

This is a bubble created mostly by crypto that is driving prices up because their demand greatly exceeds supply.

Most of the time, 1 gamer = 1 card; for crypto, it's like a dozen guys run hundreds if not thousands of GPUs. It's basically hoarding a finite resource.

If gamers ever cause GPU stock to be unavailable for literally years and drive prices up to triple their msrp, yes. Then you can be mad at gamers.

It's not about creating demand. It's about creating wild swings in demand AND supply. Miners buy en masse when profitable and sell when not. That's what messes up the market. Gamers won't do that.

You're right. $NVDA went from $2.6B in R&D for FY2019 to $6.3B for FY2022; and they've done a few cloud acquisitions in the meantime. They'll go through a tough period, sales wise, as the market gets flooded with second-hand stuff, but their fundamentals are solid.

Steady demand (ie gamers) is good for making investments into the future. A massive flood of temporary demand (ie crypto) is dangerous. If they make huge investments to be able to meet crypto demand and it disappears in two years, then the manufacturers are overextended (probably on loans); they might go under when the flood abates or they might drive prices down to levels which cannot sustain future investment. The flood of crypto demand also harms their steady market of gamers: witness how much resentment has been expressed toward crypto and Nvidia in this thread.

No, you should thank them for giving constant demand for consumer products. Without them you would be paying enterprise prices for the same cards...