Buying a new console got a lot more expensive in 2026, and it’s not slowing down. The reason has nothing to do with gaming at all, it’s about memory chips, and who’s actually buying them.
Why Consoles Keep Getting More Expensive
Every console runs on RAM and flash storage, the same DRAM and NAND memory chips found in laptops, phones, and PCs. Throughout 2025 and 2026, the companies that make almost all of the world’s memory, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, have been shifting manufacturing capacity away from consumer memory and toward high-bandwidth memory built specifically for AI data centers.
The result has been a steep, sustained price increase across the entire memory market. Spot pricing for a 16GB DDR5 chip rose from roughly $6.84 in September 2025 to $27.20 by December, a 298% increase in three months. Analysts have tracked DRAM contract price increases in the range of 50% to 90% quarter over quarter through 2026, and forecasts from firms like Jefferies and Gartner don’t expect meaningful relief until 2028.
Console makers haven’t been able to absorb that. Microsoft raised Xbox Series X and Series S prices multiple times in 2026, most recently in August, citing the DRAM shortage directly. Valve raised Steam Deck OLED prices by roughly 44% in May 2026. Nintendo has reportedly considered raising the price of the Switch 2. And according to Bloomberg, Sony may delay the PS6 entirely, potentially pushing its release to 2028 or 2029, which would make it the longest gap between PlayStation generations in the platform’s history.
None of this means people have stopped wanting to play games. It means the traditional path to playing them, buying dedicated hardware, is getting slower and more expensive at exactly the same time.
The Platform That Doesn’t Need New Hardware
Browser games don’t have this problem. They don’t require a console, a graphics card, or a memory upgrade. They run on whatever device someone already owns, a laptop, a school Chromebook, a phone, a tablet, and they’re accessible the moment someone clicks a link.
That’s always been true of browser games. What’s changed is the cost of the alternative. When a new console costs hundreds of dollars more than it did a year ago, and the next generation might not arrive until the end of the decade, a platform that requires no new hardware at all becomes a lot more relevant, not just for players, but for the people building games in the first place.
Why the Tools for Building Browser Games Matter More Now
If more people are going to play games in a browser, more people need a real way to build them there too, and that’s where most existing tools fall short. Traditional game engines, even browser-capable ones, were built around canvas and WebGL rendering, and around a workflow that still assumes you’ll export, upload, and host your game separately from wherever you built it.
Orbem Studio was built differently. It’s a no-code, browser-native game engine that runs entirely on the DOM, no canvas, no WebGL, no export step. A game built on Orbem Studio is a webpage from the moment you start building it, live at its own URL instantly, shareable the same way you’d share any other link.
That architecture makes iteration genuinely fast. Add a character, place an enemy, write a line of dialogue, and see it working immediately, in the same window, without a build step in between. For a creator trying ideas quickly, that loop, change something, see it instantly, matters as much as any single feature.
Closing the Gap Between an Idea and a Finished Game
The biggest barrier to finishing a game usually isn’t the engine, it’s not having the art or music to make an idea feel real. Orbem Studio addresses this directly with Orbem Studio Community, a built-in marketplace where pixel artists, composers, and sound designers list their work for sale, and it appears directly inside the builder, in the exact image or audio field where a creator needs it.
A writer with a story and no art skills can buy a character sprite for a couple of dollars and drop it straight into their game. A pixel artist with no interest in learning music can license a soundtrack the same way. Neither has to leave the builder or hunt through a separate storefront, and the artists themselves get paid directly, automatically, whenever their work is used.
That combination, an engine built for instant iteration and sharing, plus a marketplace connecting builders with real artists and musicians, is aimed squarely at the gap between having a game idea and actually finishing one.
What This Means Going Forward
Console gaming isn’t disappearing. But the era of a new console launching every few years at a predictable, affordable price is running into a real, well-documented constraint that has nothing to do with player demand and everything to do with the global memory supply. As that continues, browser-based games, and the tools built to make creating them as frictionless as playing them, are positioned to matter more than they have in years.
Orbem Studio is free to start at orbem.studio, with a marketplace of pixel art, music, and sound effects available directly inside the builder.