Nam Hyun-woo has worked as a staff writer at The Korea Times since 2013, mostly covering business and politics. He currently belongs to the Business Desk where he covers topics such as emerging tech, AI, ICT and Korea's chaebol community. Prior to joining the team, he was the paper's correspondent for the presidential office of Korea during the Yoon Suk Yeol and Moon Jae-in administrations.
Memory price hike tests game developers
A person holds the ROG Xbox Ally by ASUS at the Montreal International Gaming Summit in Canada, Nov. 11, 2025. AFP-Yonhap
By Nam Hyun-woo
Studios grapple with increasing importance of optimization, changes to monetization models
The soaring price of memory chips is posing new challenges for game developers in Korea, affecting launch plans for gaming consoles and PCs and ultimately pushing up the prices gamers have to pay to play high-spec games.
Multiple reports have recently claimed that the launches of next-generation consoles, including Sony’s PlayStation 6, have been delayed past their initial release windows of 2027-28 due to a shortage of memory chips and the resulting price hikes.
The PC market is also facing difficulties due to the memory bottleneck. According to Danawa, a PC parts shopping platform, Samsung Electronics’ 16-gigabyte DDR5-5600 memory is now trading at around 300,000 won ($207) as of Monday, nearly six times higher than the 51,000-won level seen between December 2024 and January 2025.
As soaring demand for artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators pushes the world’s top three memory makers — Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Micron — to concentrate on advanced AI-specific products such as high-bandwidth memory, production of conventional dynamic random access memory has been scaled back, dragging down the supply of graphics double data rate (GDDR) memory and subsequently consumer graphics cards.
Samsung Electronics' 24-gigabyte GDDR7 / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics
As rising memory prices drive up the prices of consoles and PCs, the overall costs that gamers have to shoulder to play new titles are steadily increasing.
Game developers are already raising the prices of packaged games or subscription fees to offset soaring development budgets and other costs. For example, Pearl Abyss’ upcoming action title, Crimson Desert, is priced at $69.99 for the digital standard edition, while Nexon’s ARC Raiders Deluxe Edition is selling for $59.99. In this situation, developers are monitoring whether further increases in hardware costs could ultimately push some players away from gaming altogether.
“Studios working on large-scale new titles — especially console games and AAA projects — are watching the situation very closely,” an official at a major game company here said. AAA, or triple-A, generally refers to games with a budget of over $100 million, typically from big studios.
“The more high-performance the game is, the more memory capacity it inevitably requires, so this is an issue that developers simply cannot treat as a problem on the hardware side.”
Industry officials admit that it is virtually impossible to stop game prices from rising, as development costs and labor expenses continue to climb. They note, however, that if the overall cost of playing games becomes too expensive, demand will inevitably weaken, which is why developers are afraid of setting hardware requirements for PCs or consoles too high and risking a contraction in the overall market.
A gameplay scene of Pearl Abyss' upcoming action title, Crimson Desert / Captured from official teaser video
“In the end, developers need to keep pushing graphics quality forward while at the same time lowering the hardware requirements so that players don’t have to replace their devices often,” a second industry official said. “The more people who can play, the more revenue a company ultimately makes, so the priority is making sure users can enjoy games without feeling financially burdened.”
Other officials echoed that optimization — the postdevelopment process of refining a title so it delivers high-quality graphics and gameplay without demanding high-end hardware — is more important than ever in the current hardware environment.
“When the way people play games changes, it is natural that game companies have to adapt,” a third official said.
“Game developers can’t stop hardware prices from rising, but we do have to make efforts to optimize our games so that users can enjoy smoother gameplay on the devices they already own. Growing the user base is directly tied to revenue, so we have to be careful not to let the costs of playing games become too high.”
Altering the monetization model is another way to lower cost barriers for users. A fourth industry official said game developers are paying closer attention to expanding so-called “soft landing” models for packaged games, in which titles are released at a relatively low upfront price and players gradually spend more as they continue playing, helping to lower the entry barrier while keeping the user pool broad.