RAM prices are spiking and everyone feels it
If you have been shopping for a new gaming PC or even a simple RAM upgrade lately, you have probably noticed something painful. Memory and SSD prices are way up compared to a year or two ago. What used to be a great time to grab fast DDR4 or DDR5 kits and high capacity SSDs has turned into a much more expensive upgrade path.
This is not just frustrating for home builders and PC gamers. Big game studios are getting hit too. In a recent interview, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke talked about how today’s hardware market is making game development harder to plan and more expensive to execute.
Larian is the team behind Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity. These are huge games that need a lot of memory and storage during development. According to Vincke, the current prices of RAM and SSDs are unlike anything the studio has dealt with before.
He describes facing issues with “the price of RAM and the price of SSDs” and says the situation has become tough enough that it ruins their internal projections. When a studio starts a big game, it makes long term plans around where hardware prices are likely to go. Historically, that curve has been easy to guess. Memory gets cheaper over time, storage gets cheaper over time, and developers can assume that the average gaming PC a few years from now will have more of both.
Right now, those assumptions are breaking.
How AI is soaking up memory and storage
The biggest reason for the spike is not traditional PC gamers or even normal data center workloads. It is generative AI. Massive AI models and the servers that run them are consuming a huge amount of memory chips and fast storage. This changes the entire supply and demand balance for the components that also feed our gaming PCs.
On the surface, the memory in these AI servers does not look like the DIMMs you slot into your motherboard. High bandwidth memory or HBM is tightly integrated into GPUs and accelerators in data centers. But under the hood it is still DRAM, just like the chips used to build desktop RAM kits.
When cloud providers and big tech companies buy up enormous quantities of HBM for AI servers, that DRAM has to come from somewhere. The more DRAM capacity that gets reserved for high end AI hardware, the less is left over for regular consumer products like:
- DDR4 and DDR5 desktop RAM
- Laptop memory modules
- DRAM used inside SSD controllers and caches
Less supply with strong demand pushes prices up. That is why you may have seen RAM prices climbing almost in real time on big retailers. SSDs have followed a similar pattern. There was a brief golden age where a fast 1 TB or even 2 TB SSD was incredibly cheap for the performance you got. Manufacturers then cut production because prices were too low to be profitable. Now AI infrastructure spending is exploding, pulling more chips into data centers and away from the consumer space, and prices are rising again.
According to analysis from PC hardware writers tracking the market, hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into AI infrastructure from companies around the world. As long as that wave continues, it is hard to predict any serious drop in memory or SSD prices. That uncertainty is exactly what is making planning difficult for studios like Larian.
Why this matters for future PC games
When you are making a big RPG or any large scale game, you are building for several different targets at once. There is the PC market today. Then there is the PC market two to four years from now, when your game actually launches, and possibly another few years of post launch updates and expansions.
Developers normally assume that by the time their game ships, the average gamer will have more RAM, faster SSDs and generally better hardware than the day they started the project. This lets them push visual quality, level size and loading systems while still hitting reasonable performance on mainstream systems.
If RAM and SSD prices stay high, fewer players will upgrade as aggressively. That means more people will be stuck on 8 or 16 GB RAM and smaller older SSDs or even hard drives. For a studio like Larian that likes to create huge worlds with tons of assets and complex systems, that becomes a serious design constraint.
Vincke mentions that the team will likely need to do more optimization work earlier in development, including during early access, than they planned. Instead of focusing mainly on features and content, they need to spend more time making sure the game runs acceptably on hardware that is not improving as quickly as expected. That can mean:
- More aggressive texture and asset streaming systems
- Lower base memory footprints for levels and characters
- Extra time spent trimming loading times for slower drives
- Additional graphics and performance options to scale down for weaker rigs
All of that is good for players with mid range PCs, but it also costs time and money for the studio. When hardware trends were predictable, developers could time that work more efficiently. Now they are forced to react to a volatile market that is heavily influenced by trends outside traditional gaming.
There is also a strange twist. Some of the same game studios hurt by high memory prices are experimenting with AI tools themselves. In Larian’s case, Vincke says they use generative AI only at the very early concept stage. It helps explore compositions and ideas that later get replaced with original concept art. He compares it to using Google or art books as reference, not as a final asset generator.
Other studios use machine learning to handle repetitive tasks like resizing armor pieces for different character models. These uses are meant to cut down on busywork, not to replace core creative work. Still, it creates an odd situation where game developers are lightly tapping into technologies that, at scale, are also contributing to the same market pressure driving up their hardware costs.
What this means for your next upgrade
For PC gamers, the takeaway is simple. RAM and SSD prices are unlikely to return to the rock bottom levels we saw during the cheapest years unless there is a major shift in demand or manufacturing. If you see a solid deal on a reputable DDR4 or DDR5 kit or a fast NVMe SSD, it may be worth grabbing rather than waiting for another price crash that might not come soon.
For future games, expect developers to talk more openly about memory footprints and storage requirements. When you see recommended specs asking for 16 GB of RAM and large SSD space, that is not just bloat. It reflects the reality of modern game engines and the cost of trying to support older or lower end setups.
In the end, both gamers and game studios are riding the same hardware roller coaster. The boom in AI is pushing component prices up, and that is rippling through everything from your next RAM upgrade to how your favorite RPG is built behind the scenes.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/swen-vincke-says-the-price-of-ram-and-ssds-means-larian-will-be-doing-lots-of-optimisation-in-divinitys-early-access-that-we-didnt-necessarily-want-to-do-at-that-point-in-time/
