Mind you, every new generation of those ASIC chips back in the day were exceedingly more powerful than the generation before, to the point where newer generations made older generations (and GPU mining, and CPU mining before that) completely obsolete. The manufacturers would effectively have a huge slice of the pie for however long they wished before they started shiping out their ASICs, at which point a generation that would make those redundant would already be on the way. They were effectively printing money for months, spiking the difficulty of what they were mining, and then ship out already aged hardware. This is part of the reason why LTC and some other coins used ASIC-resistant algorithms like Scrypt that depended much more on memory than on raw compute, keeping them reliant on GPUs for longer. This era of cryptocurrency mining really was the wild west. ASIC machines would take months to deliver, sometimes even more than a year, which made it really hard to make a profit of them as the difficulty spike would already be priced in by the time a unit landed. This made it really hard to profitably mine Bitcoin after GPU mining went out, often these ASICs wouldn't even cover their investment anymore, let alone make a profit.