Game development is now affected by the RAM crisis

Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke says that the current RAM and SSD crisis will force his team to do a lot of optimization work on Divinity.

Game development is now affected by the RAM crisis
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TL;DR: Rising DDR5 memory and storage costs, driven by the ongoing DRAM crisis and AI demand, are causing supply shortages and higher prices through 2026. This forces game developers like Larian Studios to optimize AAA titles for limited RAM and VRAM, impacting PC gaming performance and hardware upgrade cycles.

If you've been tracking PC hardware prices, you've probably noticed that high-capacity DDR5 memory kits now cost more than a PlayStation 5. And with the DRAM crisis affecting any piece of hardware with memory, alongside rising storage costs, several analysts and companies are predicting that the situation will only get worse throughout 2026, potentially leading to historic consumer shortages.

Larian Studios' follow-up to Baldur's Gate 3 is called Divinity.
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Larian Studios' follow-up to Baldur's Gate 3 is called Divinity.

Yes, even though the insatiable demand from data centers and AI is leading memory makers to focus on expensive, cutting-edge HBM with high margins, they're still unable to keep up. Micron, which recently shuttered its consumer-facing Crucial brand to focus on high-bandwidth memory for AI, recently noted in its latest earnings report that supply will remain "substantially short of the demand" for the "foreseeable future."

What does this mean for gaming, specifically high-profile AAA-style experiences with a focus on immersive and detailed visuals? Well, a fundamental shift in how game developers will approach making games for the "foreseeable future." And with that, game developers will be forced to optimize performance for systems with limited RAM and VRAM.

In a recent interview with The Gamer, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke, the head of the studio behind Baldur's Gate 3 and the upcoming Divinity, shared these sentiments. When discussing the upcoming Early Access release of Divinity, he said that one of the new issues the team is facing is "the price of RAM and the price of SSDs."

"And f**k, man. It's like, literally, we've never had it like this," Swen Vincke adds. "It kind of ruins all of your projections that you had about it because normally, you know the curves, and you can protect the hardware. It's gonna be an interesting one. It means that most likely, we already need to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn't necessarily want to do at that point in time. So it's challenging, but it's video games."

Now, this isn't merely about high prices; reports indicate that laptop makers will be reducing the RAM in mid-range laptops from 16GB to 8GB, alongside GPUs for PC gaming, which are also set to see substantial price increases as we head into 2026. This not only dramatically slows down the standard upgrade cycle for consumers, but also forces people to stick with older hardware, buy the absolute minimum they can get away with, and wait for a year or two or three for things to get back to normal.

To reach the largest possible audience, game developers will need to optimize for the hardware available to them. Which, for developers like Larian Studios and others, means pressing pause on the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey results, which show that most PC gamers have systems with 16GB of RAM and GPUs with 8GB of VRAM.