Yes becaus people who already had the video cards were using them to game, and mine on the side. But to buy it and mine exclusively had to be crazy. I dont even think they knew about the gpu power until 2011 or 2012. They were still using cpu back then until they figured out the computing efficiency
I remember doing that actually. Gamed and mined a little whenever I wasn't gaming.
I did buy a couple of graphics cards just to mine bitcoin. There was simply no decent way to trade traditional currency for BTC yet back then, no localbitcoins, no widespread community.
If you wanted bitcoins, you had to mine them.
Fun fact: Bought the cards brand new. Sold them half a year later for about 20% profit. Bitcoin mining had actually created a scarcity in graphics cards with all the decent ones being back ordered for weeks. I do wonder if the sales guys at ATI knew what the hell was going on. I never really bothered to check, but I can imagine an overproduction happening when ASIC's became a reality.