If you were hoping that the AI-pocalypse-fueled RAM shortage might show any signs of slowing down soon, then I have some horrible news for you. Valve’s Steam Machine engineers have recently claimed that the shortages are “getting worse” and that currently retail stock supplies are “lagging” by about “three to six months.”
If you think the Steam Machine is ridiculously overpriced right now, just you wait until Valve has to manufacture more of them, as two of Valve’s engineers, Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais, revealed during an interview with Bloomberg (via PC Gamer) that prices will likely shoot up further by the start of 2027.
“We knew there was going to be an issue with sourcing,” stated Aldehayyat. “But the extent was beyond anything we actually expected.”
“Honestly, it’s still getting worse,” he continued. “Just in case people are not aware. What people are seeing on retail shelves right now, from our observations, is lagging what we’re seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months.”
“We’re basically building everything we can get our hands on,” added Griffais. “We’re limited by memory capacity, for sure.”
This, unsurprisingly, echoes a similar comment made by Griffais last month, who stated during an interview with Gamers Nexus that sourcing the DRAM required to produce the Steam Machine had been an uphill battle because Valve was unable to secure contracts with any manufacturers.
“Look, there’s no contracts,” Griffais noted in June. “There’s nothing. Like, those guys…they are…they give us a price every month or something and they say ‘You can buy that many’ and it’s yes or no. And if we say no, then they never talk to us again.”
On the plus side, there is still a faint glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. At this point, we’ll have to hope that the class action lawsuit issued against the three largest RAM and chip manufacturers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology, which accuses them of colluding to artificially raise the prices of RAM, eventually bears fruit.
Otherwise, yeah, we might just be screwed if that doesn’t work out. Our only other hope is that someone manages to figure out time travel, so they can convince Sam Altman that this “ChatGPT” thing sounds like a dumb idea, and that he should stick to making that geosocial networking app that he was working on instead. Either that or we can just teleport to 2010, so we can buy a bunch of cheap RAM (and maybe some Pokémon cards while we’re at it).