PC gamers were left scratching their heads when Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight revealed its surprisingly beefy spec requirements last month. The recommended rig to play the open-world action game would need a whopping 32GB of RAM. No longer. The action-adventure’s developers have now slashed that requirement in half as the great AI-fueled RAM shortage of 2026 intensifies.

The Lego Batman specs were a shock when they were first spotted on January 17. They were immediately compared to the specs for the last Lego game, 2022’s Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, which had a recommendation of just 8GB of RAM. That number had been multiplied four times for TT Games’s newest Lego anthology in as many years. It was immediately accused of being the latest example of PC games coming in hot and under optimized.

The studio responded at the time by saying that Lego Batman was still being optimized but something had to be submitted on the spec sheet to get a Steam listing published so the game could start collecting pre-orders and wishlists. It turns out TT Games was being conservative and significant improvements have been made. No one’s going to have to go out and buy another 16GB stick just to run around Lego Gotham when the game launches on May 29.

“As part of our ongoing testing for LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight on PC, we have revised our recommended hardware specifications from 32 GB RAM down to 16 GB RAM,” reads a new update on February 13. “Please note, our PC specs at this stage are not final. We will be continuing to optimize and make improvements as we move closer to launch. For more information, visit our product page on Steam.”

RAM shortage fuels spec retreat

Lego Batman isn’t the first game to go on this recommended PC spec rollercoaster ride. IO Interactive’s 007: First Light, out just days before on May 27, also walked back a pretty unforgiving initial spec sheet earlier this year. That game also recommended 32GB at first before later dropping the requirement to 16GB. Its VRAM requirement dropped as well. IO Interactive blamed the whole thing on a miscommunication.

To put this all in perspective, say you were someone planning on playing one or both of these games on PC. Your rig only has 16GB of memory right now, so you’d have originally needed to upgrade. If you’d done that last fall, the popular Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory would have only cost you $80. Now it’s being sold for double that at $160, at least when it’s available to buy at all.

These AI-fueled price hikes don’t seem to be turning around anytime soon. Valve already blamed these spikes for why the Steam Machine’s pricing hasn’t been revealed yet and why it’s now expected to ship later in the first half of 2026 than previously planned. Lego Batman wasn’t the first to budge on its spec requirements and it definitely won’t be the last PC game this year to blink, either.

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