Swen Vincke says the price of RAM and SSDs means Larian will be doing lots of optimisation in Divinity’s early access ‘that we didn’t necessarily want to do at that point in time’

RAM prices have been, uh—bad. You can keep track of them yourself via the work of our diligent hardware team, but the rampant use of generative AI by big tech has led to such sharp increases, you could basically watch them climb in real time. This has also impacted Larian, of all people.

That’s per an interview with TheGamer, wherein Larian CEO Swen Vincke told the site that it’s facing issues with “the price of RAM and the price of SSDs and fuck, man. It’s like, literally, we’ve never had it like this”.

The problem is, it seems, the slow pace of game development—especially if you’re Larian, you’re going to be designing architecture for a game that’ll be both simultaneously coming out in a few years but also releasing now, so figuring out a level of optimisation that’s reasonable (while still making the thing look good) takes a bit of soothsaying.

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“It kind of ruins all of your projections that you had about,” he explains, “because normally, you know the curves, and you can protect the hardware. It’s gonna be an interesting one. 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.”

In this handy explainer by PC Gamer’s own Jacob Fox, the problem for everybody—including big game studios—is that AI is guzzling up all of the technological real estate. While SSDs had a brief window where they were downright cheap for the amount of oomph they gave you, those times are long past.

Basically, and I’m just going to quote Jacob here because he does a better job explaining than I can: “This isn’t the same as the DDR memory we get in our gaming PCs, but the memory chips are DRAM just like we use in our familiar DIMMs. AI servers buying up HBM means less DRAM in the market for our RAM kits, which causes prices to rise.”

Combine that with hundreds of billions of dollars being pumped into AI infrastructure, and—yeah, any hardware projections go to pot, bubble or no bubble.

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If you’re reading this and have been paying attention to the news/social media, you might also know that Larian’s hot off the frying pan for its (minor, Vincke argues) use of AI, which Vincke maintains is only used to explore concepts “just like we use Google and art books. At the very early ideation stages we use it as a rough outline for composition which we replace with original concept art. There is no comparison”.

It’s tricky. Obviously, the easy dunk—not that I’m taking it—is that Vincke is complaining about skyrocketing SSD and RAM prices in one hand, while also making contributions (however small) to the industry that’s causing those issues in the first place.

But Larian’s usage seems to be mostly in line with other studios I am not, at present, raking over the coals: Unless something’s changed, WoW’s just been using it to resize shoulder-pads for other races, and I cannot rightly get incensed about that either. Either way, Larian’s feeling the burn from a hardware pricing perspective like the rest of us.