I was also wondering why nvidia felt the need to step in. Selling cards is selling cards, having too much demand doesn't seem like a problem they should want solved.
Sure it does incur some PR cost as gamers are frustrated not to be able to purchase the cards, but I doubt it really damages their brand in the long term, and AFAIK AMD also faces similar issues so it's not like it massively benefits the competition.
If I were nvidia I'd be cynically very happy that miners are buying my cards in droves. What am I missing?
The problem is that the mining bubble is temporary, and when it crashes, these miners dump their cards in the used market with _very_ attractive pricing.
In 2018, something similar happened; ETH mining became unprofitable and the result was that used Pascal cards were available for the cheap in the second hand market. The problem for NVIDIA? Turing, the successor to Pascal, released in September 2018.... and many people, instead of buying that, just bought used Pascal cards.
IIRC, NVIDIA even commented that high end sales were low compared to previous generations in an quarterly report.
Granted, the second hand market cannot be solely blamed for this, as Turing was really unattractively priced. (They shifted each tier up, so the $370 GTX 1070 was replaced with a $500 RTX 2070)
These mining cards cannot be used for gaming (this is not the first time NVIDIA releases dedicated mining cards. 2017 had P106 mining cards as well, and when people tried using them for gaming on the cheap++, NVIDIA blocked it through a driver update) and thus reduce the risk for NVIDIA in the future.
++there was some software that allowed you to render on a GPU, and output video from another GPU like the dedicated iGPU of Intel CPUs. Looking Glass, I think? But I don't fully remember. These days, this functionality is actually integrated into Windows 10.
Market segmentation is always better if you can pull it off. That way you can optimally serve two demand curves instead of just one. Sell more units at a lower price to gamers, for higher total profit from gamers, and sell at an even higher price to crypto miners, for a higher total profit from miners.
And those miner cards can't become gamer cards so gamers will need to buy a new card instead of an old high end miner card when crypto falls out of style again.
Also quite toxic for your brand, since those used cards may have been run under high power loads and at high temperatures for a long time - the card may wear out sooner and make the gamer unhappy that it was "unreliable" and they wasted their money
They anticipated selling stripped down cards to miners for a higher price.
If they wanted gamers to have these cards they would just give out purchase invites via gaming hardware sites like Gamer's Nexus. They already make deals to supply OEMs before general retail, so all the gaming hardware being build is getting a supply either way.
You forget the other part of the equation. Gaming companies. If gamers can't get their hands on decent hardware they'll stop buying games altogether. Thus the pressure doesn't come from consumers alone.
Sure it does incur some PR cost as gamers are frustrated not to be able to purchase the cards, but I doubt it really damages their brand in the long term, and AFAIK AMD also faces similar issues so it's not like it massively benefits the competition.
If I were nvidia I'd be cynically very happy that miners are buying my cards in droves. What am I missing?