Larian Studios CEO claims RAM shortage is hurting development of upcoming Divinity game

RAM prices have been rising fast over the past few months, and there are no clear signs that things will calm down anytime soon. Most gamers already feel the impact when trying to upgrade their PCs, but it turns out the problem goes much deeper than that, as game developers are also being affected.

Larian Studios, the team behind Baldur’s Gate 3, is currently working on a new Divinity game. In a recent interview with TheGamer, studio CEO Swen Vincke explained that the ongoing RAM shortage is creating serious problems for development. According to him, the situation is unlike anything the studio has dealt with before. Normally, teams can predict hardware trends and plan around them. This time, those plans no longer work.

"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 explained that the rising memory costs have disrupted their projections and made it harder to manage development resources. Because RAM has become more limited and expensive, the team now has to focus on heavy optimization much earlier than planned. 

"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." Vincke continued, "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."

Just like Baldur’s Gate 3, Divinity is expected to launch in early access first as well, which already comes with its own challenges. Early access means developers must support a live version of the game while still building it. However, adding deep performance optimization on top of that makes the process even harder. Vincke admitted that this extra work was not part of the original plan, but it has become necessary due to current hardware limits.

The RAM shortage itself is driven largely by demand from AI data centers. Large companies are buying massive amounts of memory, leaving fewer supplies for consumer and creative markets. This has pushed DDR5 prices to extreme levels. For instance, Asgard recently launched a 256GB DDR5 RAM kit China, and it costs more than Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090 GPU. 

A Sapphire PR manager did recently advise consumers not to panic buy, saying that DDR5 prices could improve within six months. However, considering the market conditions are unstable and the demand from AI companies is not slowing down, it can take longer than that.