yes they are basically scalping their cards and gouging. but also yes, in a manner of speaking, cost to produce did increase as well. because otherwise, they would use their limited production capacity on even more profitable chips.

maybe we just gotta stop paying for crappy games and machines to run them, some of the best games I've played ran on a 486

if idiots play along.

It's market pricing. The mechanism works like an auction, so the price rises as long as someone is willing to pay more. But the costs of production may be going up for that model because the chips are being used for AI slop factories instead.