This may look true from the perspective of a single sale, but in the long term this just doesn't hold up. NVIDIA builds a strong and long-held reputation with gamers, and are a well renowned name in the field. If they made cards for miners at the detriment of gamers, they risk losing that valuable market position.

This is a common sentiment I see on discussion forums, but I think it's wishful thinking at best. Most consumers aren't enthusiasts that follow these types of news, and even the ones who do probably won't care/remember a few years down the line. After all, nvidia seems to be doing just fine despite their long history of anti-consumer practices over the years.

I think they run the risk of people giving up on pc gaming completely or never getting into it in the first place. A market that has and should be growing will shrink instead.

This is already happening. I have friends who would, in other circumstances, be building gaming PCs right now, so we could play games together, but–

It's simply not possible.

Which anti-consumer practices? That is, given that we're talking about gamers.

There's Nvidia's longstanding allergy to open source, but that only affects the tiny fraction of gamers who use Linux.

There's this hash rate thing, but from a gamer's perspective that's pro-consumer.

I suppose you can count their price increases for recent GPU generations. But I don't know if that rises to the level of "anti-consumer". Especially when they've been delivering performance to match.

The best example I can think of is their policy of requiring servers to use their more-expensive 'professional' line of GPUs. This does hurt gamers, since it forces game streaming services using Nvidia cards to charge higher prices. That said, among the major streaming services, Stadia, xCloud, and PlayStation Now all use AMD GPUs, while GeForce Now can skirt the policy since it belongs to Nvidia itself. The remaining services are relatively obscure – though perhaps they'd be less obscure if Nvidia didn't have that policy.

Would be true if there is healthy competition. And if a significant percentage of potential buyers would know about it and thus avoid NVIDIA. However in reality most customers wont know and they still get the GPU its just expensive which they most likely see as a result of the pandemic.

I thought this was long ago disproven. That at very early stages yes breakeven or small loss happens. But rapidly becomes mildly profitable per unit

Is this as a result of how the r&d expenses are deducted against revenue, or manufacturing process improvements?

Mostly software subscriptions, actually.. things like PS Plus, etc. On consoles, you need to pay money (subscription) to be able to play multi-player for instance (whereas on PC it's free), and games in general are more expensive compared to PC (last time I checked).