Valve say there's no end in sight to the memory crisis, prices going to increase

ViktorRay

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles launched in Fall of 2020. That’s almost 6 years ago. The PlayStation 6 and the new Xbox should be launching soon. If not this fall then perhaps next fall when it will be 7 years from the launch of the current generation. How will the memory crisis impact all of this? Also I find it kind of ironic. In the 2010’s PC gamers would go online all the time and sneer about how consoles were holding back PC gaming. How they could upgrade their PC’s but games were still not unlocking the full potential of their PCs due to having to optimize for the old PS4 and Xbox One hardware. And now on the same forums PC gamers actually keep talking about how they don’t want Sony and Microsoft to release new hardware. And they talk about how devs should be optimizing for old hardware. So many complaints about Doom The Dark Ages requiring ray tracing and requiring new hardware…. The hardware that Doom the Dark Ages (2025) requires all came out a few years prior. Imagine somebody in 2004 when Half life 2 came out complaining their Half life 1 (1998) hardware didn’t work for that game…but that’s what many gamers online said when their rigs that could play Doom Eternal (2020) couldn’t play Doom the Dark Ages (2025). “How the turn tables” as Michael Scott famously said I guess.

adrian_b

For USA, indeed there is no end in sight to the memory crisis, as long as its politicians work for companies like Micron, which obtains huge profits from the inflated memory prices. A few days ago, the representatives John Moolenaar (R-MI) and George Whitesides (D-CA) have urged the Trump administration to prevent the purchase by US companies of DRAM and flash memory made by the Chinese manufacturers, which are the only ones who do not belong to the cartel Micron-Samsung-Hynix, so they are willing to sell at lower prices. Besides, the AI companies, the US government is the main agent working already for many years to artificially limit the competition in several critical markets, including smartphones, DRAM and SSDs, and it has succeeded to cause great price increases, which have hurt people all over the world. If those like the US representatives mentioned above succeed in their actions, then it is likely that the memory price crisis will extend for a much longer time inside US than in the rest of the world. Living in Europe, it will be more advantageous for me if the Trump administration restricts even further the availability of memories inside US, because then those will be more available in the rest of the world.

blitzar

Given their choice not to hedge memory prices early for the steam machine, I am not sure they have a great track record when it comes to predicting which way the prices will be going.

warumdarum

Have fun to reprogram your games for memory efficiency with llms trained on code grown during a memory glut. What a blindspot..

ekianjo

if you are interested in sales numbers for the Steam Machine a relevant post I made yesterday: https://boilingsteam.com/steam-machine-between-10k-and-15k-s...

garciansmith

This article is just a summary of one from Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-07-17/valve-...