100%
But in 2025 99% of their focus is on the AI market I honestly believe they fully believe releasing this gpu at 299 is a charity to gamers.
Certainly they don't need the revenue but without a lower end GPU for pre-builts and the bulk of the market, many prebuilt partners would be forced to move to AMD / Intel. Once companies make that move, it's probable that a significant number would choose to keep doing their business with AMD / Intel simply due to inertia and outstanding contracts. Plus bowing out of the market like that leads to instability and that's something companies will try to avoid at all cost. If Nvidia gives them a reason to think they'll leave a market whenever it isn't profitable, that will impact their decisions when designing Prebuilt SKUs. They are going to lean towards the more consistent partner, whoever that might be, thus the impact of such a move would have implications for years even if Nvidia only skipped a single xx60 class GPU.
The customer gets a cheaper GPU than a 12 or 16GB GPU would cost. That's the benefit to the customer.
A curious conclusion given that this bracket of the market has seen shrinking die sizes and the same 8GB of VRAM gen over gen despite the cost of that same 8GB plummeting over time.
You claim that lowered costs will get passed onto consumers, and yet at least the last 3 generations of Nvidia GPUs have done the very opposite of that.
It's entirely up to the customer to decide if it's worth it for them, Jensen isn't breaking into people's houses and forcing them to buy 8GB GPUs at gunpoint. People buy it because it's worth the money to them, simple as that. If it's not worth it, they won't buy it.
What percentage of purchases nowadays do you believe the average person thinks is actually "worth it"? Particularly in the GPU market where prices have exploded over the last several generations.
I'm willing to bet that if you did a poll on PC gamers regarding if GPUs were worth the price, a good number of them would have responses ranging from "disagree" to "heavily disagree".
There are many forces that can coerce a person's purchasing decision. You are assuming everything is a free and fair choice but corporations nowadays employ tactics specifically designed to rob customers of as much power and choice as possible. Nvidia's locked down proprietary tech is the perfect example of that as is their control over the AIBs and partners. It's about reducing people's choice in the market, gaining leverage, and blocking competition.
Maybe in 2025, more people decide 8GB for $300 isn't worth it for them. I am 100% open to that being a possibility. If that happens, Nvidia will lose money and and not sell GPUs. So Nvidia has a very, very strong incentive to sell what people want.
It's unlikely to happen, merely because the company that sells 90% of all GPUs doesn't have a GPU with more than 8GB of VRAM within the vast majority of people's price range.
In addition, you are under the impression that it's within the consumer's scope to change this but the fact of the matter is that most GPUs are sold as part of prebuilt PCs and Nvidia owns the contracts for the vast majority of them. As we've seen in the laptop market, it takes years to change things over. AMD hasn't done it yet over Intel and that with it being in the lead architecturally.
At the end of the day, most OEM PCs will have Nvidia GPUs and customers won't even have a choice. On top of that most customers who buy pre-built aren't even aware that AMD is a thing and will buy Nvidia by default. Customer awareness and perception takes years to cultivate. Plenty of normies still don't know about AMD in the CPU market even.
The only portion of the market that customers are likely to influence is the custom built, and there aren't any exact numbers on how much of the total market that represents other than it being smaller than OEM / prebuilt. It's also statistically unlikely that a significant number of those people will suddenly start dropping a ton of extra cash on their GPU.
Either way, I'm not bothered, because (a) it's not my money, I just buy what is worth it to me, and (b) I'm pretty sure a $3 trillion company has put at least a little bit of thought into what the market is willing to pay for GPUs (i.e. they've thought about what people want to buy).
You'd think but given how well this generation has gone there's some serious evidence to question this notion. We shouldn't just assume that the high dollar value of a company means they do everything perfectly for the same reason we shouldn't assume that an electrical engineer is always right. Expertise in a field isn't a shield against mistakes, concerns, or errors. In fact it often works in reverse and the only antitode to pride is humility.
Anyways, 5060 is a total skip and ofc it will become the number 1 most sold card 
So yay? This is why we can't have nice things. They literally give us horrible products and people eat them up.
