Key Highlights:
- There is a RAM shortage affecting the world lately.
- This makes building PCs a whole lot more expensive.
- Consoles are also set to be affected by this, making them more pricey.
The gaming space is all set to receive a rude awakening, caused thanks to the upcoming bump in memory prices across the board. This will result in inflated prices of gaming hardware (such as consoles) which might be the start of a series of unfortunate events that shape up the industry.
Join us as we take a dive into the situation, and what it could mean for PC and console gaming as a whole.
RAM Prices Skyrocket Worldwide
The price of RAM kits have skyrocketed worldwide, and in certain cases managing to double their overall cost. There are a large number of factors responsible for this, with the primary culprits being the recent AI boom and the overall instability of the world at present. which is most certainly affecting trade.
This increased cost of production and/or shipping has trickled its way down to consumers, who are the ones suffering the most. Having to cough up over $500 for a kit of 64 GB RAM is nowhere near acceptable, and doubly unfortunate when we take into account the need for higher memory capacities due to increased workloads.
This extends into both standard DIMM modules and soldered on board RAM, affecting both consoles and PCs equally.
What This Means for Console Gaming
This will result in a direct price increase for almost all consoles. With the increased cost of memory modules, the surplus will be charged at the expense of the customer, which is partly why everyone seems to be expecting a significant price bump in the next console generation.
In a nutshell, consoles will only turn more expensive as time progresses, which might be a tough pill to swallow for most potential buyers (given that consoles have been traditionally been the more affordable entry point into gaming).
What This Means for PC Gaming
There’s good and bad news for PC gaming enthusiasts. Let’s start with the good news first. As console prices go upward, they start creeping into PC territory (in terms of price and relative performance) which in turn decreases their value by a fair margin.
In other words, PCs might finally be competitive against consoles now, even if multiple external factors had their own contributions here, as did the resurgence of PC gaming with players such as Valve taking matters into their own hands.
That is as far as the good news goes. With increased RAM prices, building PCs is going to be a lot dearer, and potential builders might be forced to make some tough decisions with their builds.
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You might find yourself stuck between spending that extra $100 on another stick of RAM, instead of a CPU/GPU upgrade, for example. RAM kits are deadly expensive right now, and things do not seem to be changing any time soon.
This is especially true for DDR5 RAM units which are a lot more expensive and capable for the price. We’ve also seen this trickle down to soldered down builds as well, with many such devices completely being out of stock (with respect to the higher RAM variants).
The best thing to do currently would be to simply wait it out. Don’t bother buying a whole lot of RAM (just buy the bare minimum – 16 GB or higher is fine for almost all use cases), unless you really know what you’re going to use that RAM for.
RAM prices are bound to crash down sooner or later, so it is worth waiting for a while.
