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| A character in Divinity. |
If you've tried to upgrade your PC recently, you've felt the sting. RAM prices are skyrocketing, with costs doubling for some kits over the past few months. But the pain isn't just for gamers building rigs; it's hitting the studios creating the games themselves, forcing major changes to how and when they develop titles.
In a stark revelation, Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian Studios—the acclaimed developer behind Baldur’s Gate 3—has detailed how the ongoing memory crisis is severely impacting the development of their next project, a new Divinity game. He describes a situation that has upended all standard industry planning.
"Interestingly, another [issue Larian is facing] is really the price of RAM and the price of SSDs and f**k, man. It's like, literally, we've never had it like this," Vincke stated in a recent interview.
How RAM Costs Are Warping Game Development
For developers, projecting hardware trends is a cornerstone of planning a multi-year project. Teams typically anticipate the power of consumer PCs years in advance, allowing them to scale their ambitions accordingly. According to Vincke, that playbook is now useless.
"It kind of ruins all of your projections," he explained. "Normally, you know the curves, and you can project the hardware. It's gonna be an interesting one."
The direct consequence? Heavy, early optimization has become an unwanted priority. With RAM becoming a scarcer, more expensive resource for the average player, Larian can't assume the same headroom they could even a year ago.
This forces a significant shift in workflow. "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," Vincke said. "So it's challenging, but it's video games."
Early Access Development Just Got Harder
This optimization burden is landing at the most delicate time. Like Baldur’s Gate 3, the new Divinity title is expected to launch via Early Access. This model already requires developers to maintain a live, playable version of the game while simultaneously building its remaining content.
Adding deep, system-level performance tuning to this volatile phase creates a formidable challenge. Vincke admitted this intensive work wasn't part of the original plan but is now a necessary response to market-driven hardware constraints. You can read the full interview with Swen Vincke detailing these challenges over at TheGamer.
The Root Cause: AI is Hogging All the Memory
Why is this happening? Look no further than the artificial intelligence gold rush. AI data centers, built by major tech companies, are consuming staggering amounts of high-performance memory (HBM and DDR5). This massive demand is draining supply and driving up prices across the entire memory market, including the consumer DDR5 modules used in gaming PCs.
The inflation is extreme. For example, Asgard recently launched a 256GB DDR5 RAM kit in China priced higher than NVIDIA's flagship RTX 5090 GPU—a shocking benchmark that illustrates the market distortion.
When Will It End? Don't Hold Your Breath.
Is there relief in sight? A Sapphire PR manager recently advised consumers not to panic buy, suggesting DDR5 prices could improve within six months. However, with AI demand showing no signs of slowing and global market conditions remaining volatile, most analysts believe the shortage—and its high prices—will persist much longer.
For now, the message from one of gaming's top studios is clear: the components crisis is no longer just a checkout shock. It's actively reshaping how our favorite games are built, forcing developers to make hard choices long before a game ever reaches our hard drives. The true cost of RAM isn't just on your receipt; it's in the development cycles of the next generation of PC games.