The thing about RAM - in Q3 2013, SK Hynix, a leading manufacturer of DDR memory had a massive factory chemical explosion, sending RAM prices through the roof. Only a month or two ago did the prices start to settle down. So actually, your RAM didn't crash in price but it's rather returning to its normal price which is great. I paid $80 for 8GB of RAM in Q4 2014, which is double what it costed before the SK Hynix explosion. As for your other parts loosing value, I personally think it's a great thing. It's a sign that the PC industry is a fast moving one and I personally would rather have bigger and better things come along that devalue my current hardware if it means that corporations aren't just sitting on their ass letting your experience get worse and worse but rather that they're innovating to try to make a great experience always available (if of course you have the money). The thing is though, if you bought a GTX 580, you aren't getting ripped off. It's still a GTX 580, it's not like they magically turned it into a GTX 560. Your parts don't degrade (with exceptions) and that means that you can have mostly the same experience that you did when you bought the product but you are limited by newer things. For example, a GTX 480 would have been designed to run the games that were considered AAA at the time - in this case an example title would be Just Cause 2. You would have bought a GTX 480 expecting to get an acceptable framerate in Just Cause 2. To this day, you can still max out Just Cause 2 at 50-60 FPS using a GTX 480. Your experience with what it was designed for is exactly the same as what it was. However, take Witcher 3 for example. A brand new title, designed to run on current hardware. A GTX 480 is going to cry itself away at horrible performance across the board in that game without turning down many settings. But that isn't what a 480 was designed for - so you're still getting your money's worth. A flagship card like the GTX 980 Ti is designed to run AAA titles for now and likely the next two years, with the expectation (a fair one) that anyone wanting to continue playing AAA after two years would buy the new better card by then.
