>

Well, yeah. High prices discouraging new buyers and recent buyers feeling burned by high prices and being unwilling to upgrade until they absolutely have to, of course sales are low.
Because no one is going to pay $1200 for a $500 GPU. >

$1800 for a significant fire hazard. >

I had to look that up so I could worry about something else, lol. I’m seeing the GTX 4090 is catching fire and I guess for the rest keep them clean, well ventilated and pray. >

It's the cheaply-made angled power connector that is prone to failure (melting), not the thermal output of the card itself. >

Nah, Gamer's Nexus did some exceptional reporting on this, and the primary issue is user error (though NVIDIA shares some blame for making the 4090 so large and awkward with a weird power adapter). >

I'd personally say it goes beyond user error when the connector seemingly requires an obscene amount of force to be fully connected. That seems more of a design flaw to me. >

The way these things SHOULD be designed is that as it comes unplugged, the sense pins should always disconnect first, safely turning off the GPU. This new connector fails at this, causing the card to think it's fully connected, but really it's barely in the socket, resulting in high resistance and a melting connector.
Connection order is basically connector design 101, even for low power stuff... If you look at the inside of a USB A connector, you'll notice 2 contacts are longer, which guarantees power and ground are connected before data. Without that devices could potentially draw power over the data pins, and cause all sorts of havoc.
Even PCI-E cards, which most people wouldn't consider to be "hot pluggable"  have 2 shortened pins so that a card is guaranteed to be fully connected before the presence pins are connected (located on each end of the card, so it works even if the card is at an angle). >

So has my bank account... >

No kidding, wonder why? >

Prices are still high from the crypto craze days, NVIDIA is continuing to push high prices but once they have a glut of cards they'll have to lower prices by hundreds of dollars
NVIDIA probably thinks they need to have a high backlog of cards incase a crypto price increase causes cards to fly off the shelves again, but with the Ethereum switch to POS the demand for GPUs won't skyrocket if crypto moons again >


Prices are still high from the crypto craze days,

Only for new Nvidia GPUs because they have been artificially limiting supply to keep prices up (CEO straight up admitted it when speaking to investors). New AMD cards are constantly on sale, and you can get some great deals if you buy used. I suspect a huge contributing factor to low sales is more people going used/refurbished. >

As a Nvidia user I can definitely say that as of 2022, AMD cards are objectively the better value if you, like me, don't give a shit about RT. My experience with RT so far is "chopping my framerate in half to get nicer reflections" so I've turned it off in most games. >

But not demand, demand remains incredibly high... it's just people can't afford the ridiculous asking prices. >

Seems like every corporation has gone on this weird big money this quarter only tangent. 
Yeah we could sell 100 whatevers for $5 each Or we can just sell 1 unit for $500! And then exclusively plan all their products and marketing about appealing to that one guy that can afford 1 $500 whatever right now and push away the long term sales. >

The thing is - they still have to manufacture a set (large number) of units for them to be even marketable, price-wise. 
During the worst of it a card that I paid ~$300 USD for before prices went bonkers was selling for over $600.00. 
I haven't been paying super close attention, so I might have this wrong, but it looks like it was the 'gold rush' fever of crypto mining that sucked the market dry - and the manufacturers raised prices to even keep some inventory available. 
I guess if that's correct, we should be seeing a glut of cheap cards coming on the market (in what kind of condition - who knows?) very soon. 
I hope so, anyway.. because i'd like to refresh my GPU this year - or buy a PS5, whichever way is the path of least resistance when i'm ready to buy. >


in what kind of condition - who knows

Usually the only thing thing that's really at risk on a long term mining card are the fan bearings, which can be swapped out for like $25. >

Typically mining cards are undervolted and with a constant load they have less use than gaming titles