@Heartbreaker
Gamers are not monolithic, but there are definitely groups of gamers that we can identify with certain behaviors. For example, there are gamers that want to run the latest games at the highest settings, and who buy expensive cards. There are also gamers like the ones that
@blckgrffn knows, who are very frugal and who tend to build to a budget. For all of these you can judge how likely a new card is going to be to make them upgrade to that card.
I actually see you getting upset any time someone argues that people exist who don't fit in your imagination of when and how gamers upgrade, which suggests that it is you who sees gamers as a monolith.
Your example of someone desperately wanting to play AW2 is not very useful and is just you cherry picking something that fits your argument, which you do all the time. Whatever a single individual does is completely meaningless to whether the 4070 Super will sell well or whether the 4070 non-super sold well.
And is Alan Wake 2 actually a game that people desperate want to play and thus a game that could drive upgrades in a meaningful way? Doesn't look like it:
It is also a fact that this game that you classify as one of the most brutal can still be played at frame rates that many people consider acceptable with a 3060 mobile, at 1080p or even 1440p:
Of course, we can also just look at Nvidia's numbers. They've had a huge decline in gaming revenue. This is despite huge sales of 4090 cards to China that mostly didn't go to gamers, but into AI servers. And Nvidia themselves is telling investors that they increased the average sales price, which logically means that their decline in revenue means that their sales numbers decreased even more, as the numbers of cards sold is the revenue divided by the average sales price of a card.
And in the Steam survey we see that the 4070 has less than half the market penetration of the 3070, despite us knowing that card sales tend to be heavily front-loaded. So the 4070 doesn't look like a sales success. But most of Ada looks quite bad with the 4060 also doing really poorly compared to the 3060.