170
One side of mouth: record profits!!
Other side: gosh thanks to things out of our control we have to raise prices!!!!! It’s not our fault!
"We could hold a certain percentage of our supply off to the side for consumers so they can afford our products and have a backup for when the AI bubble bursts, but nah let's just fuck everyone because line is going up right now and MBA brain means that's all that matters."
People joke about companies being too big to fail, but Samsung is the largest of a group of conglomerates that basically run South Korea. They know there's no way the government will allow them to collapse since they would take the Korean economy down with them. Why not take the most profitable route when there's no risk (to them, which is all they care about)?
As crazy as it seems, these companies are staffed by actual humans who still have to live in the world they create. Profits won't mean much if they use them to ruin everything around them. Not that they're smart enough to realize that.
They're inevitable because companies already know they're going to do everything they can to fuck us over for as much profit as they think is possible. We'll see how this all plays out though.
Purge LARPing?
I was thinking indie games becoming more popular, people defaulting to refurbs/repairs over new stuff, and developers being forced to optimize their software, games, and OSes, buuuuut, yeah that's a distinct possibility too.
The comments in here are starting to look like Reddit with the conspiracy nonsense.
Memory isn't expensive because Samsung is greedy or because they're secretly stockpiling product. It's because AI uses a lot of memory and so people are buying a lot of memory and it takes time for the manufacturers to increase supply to meet demand. This is 100s level economics
From: https://courses.byui.edu/econ_150/econ_150_old_site/lesson_03.htm
Memory is high because there is nothing preventing them from charging anything they want above and beyond the cost of manufacture.
Yes, that would be true if they had a true monopoly.
However, in an open market when a producer offers their goods for higher than the market rate, another producer can steal their business by simply offering the products at market rate. If Samsung decides to try to price gouge then customers can buy RAM from Micron, the only time that this isn't possible is if there is more demand than their is supply (i.e. Micron has no stock) in which case, microeconomics tells us that the market price will increase.
How naive to think they all wont do the same thing when their only goal is profit.
Now you're suggesting a price fixing conspiracy among the two largest RAM producers, that's quite a big claim so you surely have pretty solid evidence to support that position.
Being cynical isn't evidence and calling people names isn't evidence.
price fixing conspiracy among the two largest RAM producers
they are well known for doing just that. two of them are briefly explained here
No I'm not. I suggesting a for modern for profit compnay will raise prices as high as they can. You know this you are just trolling. good bye.
Ok, so who is arguing against that? Certainly not me.
Yes, every company on Earth would charge you $182737854 billion dollars for their product if they could and ever seller on earth would like to buy the product for $0. The market price is the price that both of these two opposing positions agree is fair.
You said:
Memory is high because there is nothing preventing them from charging anything they want above and beyond the cost of manufacture.
It is a requirement of every successful manufacturing business that has ever existed has to charge a price that is above the cost of manufacture. The term for this in academia is profit. If a company does not charge a price above and beyond the cost of manufacture then they're selling the product for less than it costs to make it and, unless they're Tesla, then they will eventually go out of business.
I can admit that maybe I did misread you because I assumed that you were trying to make some deeper point, because what you said, if read literally, is that "Memory is high because companies seek profit" which is the most trivially true thing you can say about economics.
So, back to basic economics.
The thing that is preventing a company from charging 'anything they want' is the fact that there are other manufacturers (because there isn't a true monopoly in the RAM market) that are competing in the same market. Nothing is preventing Samnsung from charging $150,000 for a 1GB stick of RAM, but if Micron is selling their 1GB sticks of RAM for $150 then nobody will buy from Samsung.
This a phenomena known as competition prevents Samsung from being able to sell RAM for arbitrary prices. The market sets the price, not any individual company.
I assumed you knew something so basic.
The only way a manufacturer can arbitrarily change the market price is if they are the only manufacturer, aka a monopoly (in which case the $150,000 sticks of RAM are the only ones available on the market) or they are price fixing (and Micron has secretly agreed to sell RAM at $150,000 and no other manufacturers exist).
So if you're not alleging price fixing then your comment is basically 'Companies seek to maximize profit' which is like saying the sky is blue or the sun is hot.
I think the point is that Samsung isn't forced to raise prices since their raw material and manpower costs aren't actually any higher.
However they're a for-profit company in a Capitalist system and as per the Supply-Demand inbalances as you pointed out, they're in a situation were they can raise prices without losing sales, so that's exactly what they're doing since it increases their profits.
People's outrage is at how far they are exploiting the opportunity opened by the imbalance in Supply and Demand to raise prices - memory prices doubling and trippling is something else than, say, a 40% price increase - which is not at all a denial that the opportunity is there for the suppliers to take and why.
Your explanation of the situation that allows a supplier to increase prices to get better profits does not at all sit in opposition to people being morally outraged about how far a supplier is exploiting that situation for their own gain and the loss of customers.
I mean, the claim that they're exploiting a situation is unfounded by evidence.
Anybody who is even remotely paying attention could tell you that RAM, GPU and Storage prices will increase.
If you think the prices are increasing faster than supply and demand then I presume that is based on some data and not just social media vibes. I'd be happy to look at any evidence that may exist.
People being angry, even in large numbers, doesn't make them correct. If you just glance at politics you'll find that it's very easy to make a lot of people very angry about something that isn't true.
Your post is complete total denialist bollocks, lazy bollocks even.
DDR5 RAM increased way more in 2025 (more than doubling) than the 2.69% of the USD inflation that year.
You just threw out an insult and didn't actually make a point so I'm not sure how to even respond.
It looks like you're suggesting that RAM should grow only at the pace of inflation and any deviation from that is due to greed? I hope you mean something deeper that I'm just missing your point because I find it hard to believe that you've ever taken an economics class if you don't understand how prices can grow faster than inflation.
If you understood economics you'd know that when the aggregate demand for a hot-ticket good (like RAM) shifts rightward faster than aggregate supply can respond, because of short-run capacity constraints (i.e. Samsung can only manufacture RAM so fast), the market-clearing price must rise beyond the economy-wide inflation rate to re-equilibrate. This demand-pull premium reflects the good’s low short-run price elasticity of demand. Quantity-adjustment is inelastic, so the burden of rationing falls disproportionately on price.
In other words, when an item is in demand the price rises. It can rise faster than inflation because the demand for RAM grows faster than the demand for all of the other goods and services. Since inflation is a measure in the increase in prices across all goods and services, any product that experiences a sudden increase in demand will necessarily see a price rise in excess of inflation.
I think I thoroughly proved with 5 minutes Googling and the links I provided that your claim that the extreme rise in memory prices was just "social media vibes", is complete total denialist bollocks (you're pretty much saying "not it's no just because I say so") as well as lazy (you could've easily done the 5 minutes Googling for "DDR5 price history", same as me and avoided saying such easily disproven bollocks).
You were literally bullshitting your argument when claiming that the RAM price rises weren't true or were exaggerated and then when it was proven out with actual sources (as you demanded, no less), claiming you've been insulted - yeah, well, sorry that you're trying to bullshit your way into winning an argument, mate.
As for the rest, if you seem to understand Supply/Demand based on the simplified overview explanation of it given to people who don't know enough Maths to understand it in depth and thus misused an Economics 101 simplified explanation of Supply/Demand which is only about aggregate price movements, to try and make an argument about individual market actors, a level that's beyond the scope of that simplified explanation.
Supply/Demand isn't a Law and it doesn't work in a Formulaic way - it's a Statistical and Game Theory process were the incentives of Market Actors on both sides constantly seek a balance, and when Supply changes and Demand doesn't keep up or vice-versa, that changes some incentives and the result in aggregate is that price will over time move until a new price is discovered were incentives are once again in balance, and all this has effects such as inertia as well as overshooting and undershooting of the final price.
Market Actors aren't directly forced to do anything, they're just incentivized to do so by the changed market conditions and because they see an opportunity to gain more under those new conditions but how fast and how far do they follow those incentives is up to each Market Actor.
Because this is a process in aggregate, nobody actually knows the final price once a new balance is found, plus there is a lot of room for exploiting the inertia, overshooting and undershooting of the process and extracting more profits from it, it's perfectly fair to point at a specific Market Player and say that "they're going too far" in how far and how fast they changed their prices and are profiteering from the situation.
Further and specifically for situation, all that only works well in highly competitive markets, and the memory market is no such thing hence a player like Samsung owns enough of the market that they can actually influence where the new price point will be, so is even more valid be critical of Samsung if they're perceived to be profiteering.
I believe you’re attributing views to me that I didn’t state.
-
I never claimed the price increase itself was “social-media vibes.” My sentence referred to the belief that prices are out-running supply and demand. That belief needs data, not just anecdotal posts.
-
I also never said the price rises “weren’t true.” I said the cause is straightforward demand-pull from AI, not conspiracy or hoarding. Prices can rise faster than CPI when demand shifts quickly and supply is inelastic; that’s consistent with the chart I posted.
-
My first comment was about the aggregate RAM market, not Samsung specifically. The sentence “Memory isn’t expensive because Samsung is greedy …” was meant to rebut all of the conspiratorial comments in the thread, not to build a micro-level model of Samsung’s pricing power. You’re right that an oligopoly can amplify price moves, but that point needs margin data to separate strategic withholding from pure demand-pull. You haven't provided that data.
If you have evidence that Samsung’s margins have expanded faster than the industry cost curve, I’d like to see it. Those numbers would tell us if the spike is market-clearing or profiteering.
And next time, lead with the data you did find instead of the name-calling; it lands better and actually backs the claim you’re making.
....
https://www.techspot.com/news/106834-major-dram-makers-set-halt-ddr3-ddr4-production.html
That graph is nice and simple, just like your world view. Gosh, thanks for telling us, we never knew..
they aren't justified in crashing the world economy just because capitalism says they can if they want to.
That is true, but also not what is happening.
they can choose not to hoard all semiconductors for themselves to play with ai and not crash the world economy. memory fabs can choose not to do that too.
but they don't, because capitalism says they can if they want to.
Who is they? Where did capitalism make this announcement? Who was the representative of Capitalism that said that it is okay to crash the world economy?
This sounds like conspiracy nonsense.
what do you mean? we are literally talking about the semiconductor manufacturers and ai companies, and their bubble.
what exactly is so conspiratorial about companies being allowed to cater to market forces and capital instead of people? this is literally how capitalism works according to you yourself two posts ago.
That isn't the conspiracy that I mean.
When I wrote my comment, there were about 10 other comments, half of whom were saying things like 'This is because they're all getting together to jack up the price and hoarding stock' complete conspiracy nonsense.
So I was posting to show that: "No, the price increase is expected based on normal market forces. There is no evidence of a conspiracy."
You can tell people are doomed economically when they fail to grasp supply and demand.
It's more that people want to be outraged and feel self-righteous and also the outrage bots are happy to oblige with deceptively framed stories and social media comment fabrication.
I could be wrong, and there is some evidence that Samsung is doing something shady. I think I'd know about it if it were public because I work in an office that manages large investments so news like a massive company manipulating prices would show up in the various information services that we use.
You mean Samsung who has a history of LCD panel price fixing in 2010? Or the CRT price fixing in 2018? Or the DRAM price fixing in 2005?
It's collusion.
I mean you aren't wrong but you also don't understand it.
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
170 points (100.0% liked)
PC Gaming
13139 readers
1432 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS