The GPU market is definitely suffering from having only one dominant player. I'm hoping that AMD is able to invest some of the extra cash flow since the introduction of Ryzen toward making their GPUs fully competitive with NVIDIA rather than having to play catch up all the time. Also, NVIDIA kind of has to price gouge on this generation because they made so much money during COVID and the crypto boom. Unless they want to be like Zoom or Peloton and lose 75+% of their market cap, they have to keep the profit curve from plunging. And they know there's latent demand from gamers who were priced out of the market before, plus pretty strong interest from the AI side, so why not keep the prices high to maximize profit?
I also think another factor in the rise of GPU prices is how quickly things have been moving on the display front. Not only did we go more or less directly from 1080p to 4K, thereby quadrupling resolution, now we're not shooting for 30 or even 60 fps minimums anymore. We want 1% lows to be above 120, 144, or even 240fps so that our high refresh rate monitors are properly fed. Oh, and we don't want to turn down image quality while doing it. Now throw in VR, where high-end headsets can be 4K or more per eye, and you've got a lot of pixels to push. So top-end GPUs have to be these behemoths with several kg of cooling hanging off of them, because they are now the biggest power consumer in the system. Yet they still have to fit into the real estate allotted to just a few peripheral slots, usually in an orientation that's not optimal for airflow. It's quite the engineering challenge, and I kind of see why GPUs at every level have gotten so expensive, since they're all priced relative to the top range.