RAM prices have been, uh—bad. You can keep track of them yourself via the work of our diligent hardware team, but the rampant use of generative AI by big tech has led to such sharp increases, you could basically watch them climb in real time. This has also impacted Larian, of all people.
That’s per an interview with TheGamer, wherein Larian CEO Swen Vincke told the site that it’s facing issues with “the price of RAM and the price of SSDs and fuck, man. It’s like, literally, we’ve never had it like this”.
The problem is, it seems, the slow pace of game development—especially if you’re Larian, you’re going to be designing architecture for a game that’ll be both simultaneously coming out in a few years but also releasing now, so figuring out a level of optimisation that’s reasonable (while still making the thing look good) takes a bit of soothsaying.
In this handy explainer by PC Gamer’s own Jacob Fox, the problem for everybody—including big game studios—is that AI is guzzling up all of the technological real estate. While SSDs had a brief window where they were downright cheap for the amount of oomph they gave you, those times are long past.
Combine that with hundreds of billions of dollars being pumped into AI infrastructure, and—yeah, any hardware projections go to pot, bubble or no bubble.
It’s tricky. Obviously, the easy dunk—not that I’m taking it—is that Vincke is complaining about skyrocketing SSD and RAM prices in one hand, while also making contributions (however small) to the industry that’s causing those issues in the first place.