At least one studio, Larian, has confirmed this is the case for them.

When discussing the pressures the company faces when releasing a game in early access, such as audience expectations, Vincke told us, “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.”

He continued, “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. 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.”