There were a lot of reasons for developers to be stressed out at this year's Game Developers Conference. Layoffs at EA the day the event started put job insecurity in the air, generative AI's presence at the show sparked existential dread, and the inescapable anxiety of world politics made it hard to focus on creating video games. Those are some heavy topics, and they were only made worse by an economic problem currently plaguing the game development industry: the RAM crisis.
The skyrocketing cost of memory driven by AI was a major topic at this year's GDC. If you didn't bring it up with someone in a conversation, it was because they did first. It was one of the most important narratives of the show, casting a shadow over Xbox's grand Project Helix ambitions and raising questions about how rising prices could impact how games are made. No developer I spoke to quite knew the next steps for navigating the crisis, but several saw it as a moment to finally have a serious conversation about the industry's insatiable hunt to create the most high-end games possible.
On the consumer side, the impact of the memory supply shortage is simple: RAM has gotten more expensive. Earlier this year, PC Gamer shared data showing that the price of RAM has seen a 300% increase in some cases. Upgrading your PC right now is pricier as a result, but the problem is only snowballing due to how many products ship with a memory component. It’s not your everyday shopper who is having trouble buying RAM, but the companies making the products that use it too.
What’s the problem? In very simplified terms, AI data centers require a lot of memory. There are only a handful of major memory manufacturers (Samsung and Micron, for instance) making those products, and they can make a lot more money if they sell specialized parts to AI companies rather than consumers. With more chips spoken for, low supply has led to higher costs for the rest of us. You’d think that the easy solution would be “just produce more chips,” but that’s easier said than done for a variety of factors, including the fact that RAM requires a lot of rare metals to produce. It’s also not as simple as spinning up some competing manufacturers, as that would take years. We’re at a dead end, and developers at GDC told me that we might be there for another two years.
The developers I spoke to were split on just how much that would impact game development directly. Some said that they were annoyed that it was more expensive to upgrade their own personal PCs, but that they didn’t feel it was having a knock-on effect for creating their games. Others in the space noted some tangential side effects.
“It does wind up in our conversations particularly when we’re looking at the competition,” one marketing professional told me. “If you’re asking people to suddenly pay more for their systems, that’s fewer games than they can purchase. So it does change some of the conversations around how we have to approach our price point.”
We’ve been letting cool technical work slide for so long.
But some developers see it as part of a larger existential crisis that could stand to have major downstream effects on gaming. For one, there’s uncertainty around when the next generation of game platforms will come and how much they’ll cost. The halls of San Francisco’s Moscone Center, the central nexus of GDC, were filled with rumors that Sony is targeting a 2029 release for the PlayStation 6. Xbox’s Project Helix might come sooner, considering that alpha versions of the console are scheduled to reach developers in 2027, but several people I spoke with at GDC were sure it would cost at least $1,000. Even if there’s some insider knowledge behind that speculation, you can’t take it literally right now; everything is in flux and dependent on how the RAM crisis unfolds. We’re in “wait and see” mode, and that’s sowing anxiety in an industry looking for stability.
The shortage is accelerating some conversations about what needs to change in game development, though. Optimization was a major topic at the show, with several panels dedicated to how creators can make games more efficiently. That could become less of a suggestion and more of a necessity soon. One developer I spoke to noted that studios are rethinking the PC specs for their upcoming games, as you can’t assume that players will have a rig with tons of RAM anymore. In February, for instance, TT Games revised its PC requirements for Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, reducing its RAM recommendation from 32GB to 16GB.
Some developers I spoke to believed that we could see more cases like that in the next few years. Rather than trying to push games to their technical limits, some speculated that we could see studios less shy about asset pop-in and loading screens in an attempt to ease the memory burden on games. And as a fortunate side effect for Nintendo, that could mean that more third-party games will have a better shot at running on Switch 2. That’s the kind of long-term domino effect that could change the games we play.
Even with some uncertainty around the shortages, it’s not all gloom and doom in the industry right now. ProbablyMonsters chief product officer Mark Subotnick, who previously worked at Intel as a senior director, noted that this isn’t the first supply crisis that’s impacted PC parts. These moments historically happen in cycles, so those who have been around the space for a long time feel more assured that it’ll be an annoying year or two, but not entirely abnormal.
“Does this affect us? No,” Subotnick said. “We’re making games on as many platforms as we can to delight consumers. Could it impact us? Sure. If there’s less devices for people to get their hands on, then we potentially have less consumers to sell to. But right now, I’d argue that there are plenty of consumers with plenty of devices for us to sell these games to. Where it could impact us is, sure, we will have to make decisions around next-gen platforms when they tell us that it’s time to bring content to them. And if they are threatened to have a total addressable market that is viable from a business standpoint, sure that’s a business challenge. But right now all I’d be doing is speculating on a bunch of hypotheticals.”
Even if that’s the case, many developers believe those conversations about optimization need to happen anyway. There was a consistent stress at GDC from professionals who believe that the industry’s endless chase for top-end visuals has become unsustainable. Maybe the industry should see this less as a moment to freak out over immediate news, and more so consider that players aren’t always going to have access to the top specs for any number of reasons. Building games with those players in mind is a future-proof practice that can make it easier to navigate these moments.
“I agree, let’s fucking optimize games!” Zero Parades writer Siim “Kosmos” Sinamäe told me when I mentioned the conversations I’d been having with other devs about RAM woes. “We’ve been letting cool technical work slide for so long. They don’t look that much better!”