This does suck, I have worked in retail sales for years, and now work at a fairly large and growing computer store. We had many repeat shoppers and were are pulling customers away from Best Buy because we actually know what we are talking about. BFG was one of the brands that we regularly pushed to people, both because of quality and because they backed their products up with wonderful support.
There does not seem to be a whole lot of information out there on what is going on. We pushed BFG in both ATI and Nvidia. Since the drop of carying the BFG line we have gotten in a bunch of cheap brands that customers are now going after because of the low prices, like Galaxy, Palit, Sparkle, Zotac.
Not to say all the cards from these brands are bad, but the majority of the ones we carry, they lower the specs on the cards, offer less warranty, and have crap cooling on them. Not to mention a lot of them are SYNERGY / Turbocache cards. Meaning they share (steal) system ram, some taking up to a gigabyte of memory.
Sure, they may be cheaper, but they are also less in performance. We are down to really only one brand that we can in good conscience push all their cards out the door, and that would be EVGA.