People are social animals, the Covid Pandemic shut a lot of people indoors. This gave a lot of people a lot of time to fill and not a lot of social entertainment to fill it with ....and it would appear video games are the next best thing to Bars, Strip Clups, and (W H 0 R 3) Houses of ill repute . The stimulus checks sent out to stimulate the economy put a little extra cash in many peoples pockets whether they needed it or not. With cat houses and hookers off the table many of the people who did not need the stimulis checks dumped their extra cash into other forms of entertainment like Booze, Drugs, Midget Porn, and video games.
Some of those video games turned out to be flight and space sim games that require a joystick like DCS, ED, IL2, SC, Etc. This increased demand.
The Covid Pandemic also disrupted production and logistics not only making it harder to produce flight sim controllers but also harder to get them to customers hands which also created increased demand.
Lastly we have unscrupulous individuals that will buy up an in demand product and then resell it at a higher price this is pretty common problem with graphics cards as of late (Looking at you Nvidia) but I've personally seen it effect the cost of Flight Sim Controllers, Webcams, hand sanitizer, Bottled Water, and Toilette paper.
Of course I also just recently burned $1382.16 to purchase a full Virpil VPC Hotas set up with pedals and another $819.78 for monstertech mounting hardware. I'm currently debating getting a Komodo sim Collective or wait for Virpil to get theirs out .... But I'm doing pretty good using my Mongoos t-50cm2 throttle as a collective lately so there is no rush.
Edit: While the Increase demand with decreased supply seams to cause a major problem with low end and mid ranged controllers (Twisty sticks to the Warthog) it does not seam to be effecting the high end boutique controllers like Virpil, VKB, Komodo, and Winwing (To name a few) nearly as much.
