RAMageddon Crisis Hits Retro Handheld Makers Including Evercade
▼ Summary
– Evercade sells retro gaming devices ($70–$200) and flash-based cartridges ($30), targeting enthusiasts who value physical collecting.
– Blaze Entertainment has spent its cash hoarding components like cartridge chips and RAM for years in advance due to RAMageddon price spikes.
– The company has already bought most cartridge chips needed through 2027, but will wait to purchase hardware components closer to production.
– RAMageddon has made 512MB chips more expensive than 1GB chips were, and 1GB chips are now very costly, disrupting the entire supply chain.
– The CEO states the current supply chain crisis is worse than the pandemic-era disruptions, with prices expected to keep rising due to AI industry demand.
The retro gaming industry is facing a severe crisis as the ongoing RAMageddon sends component prices skyrocketing, forcing manufacturers like Blaze Entertainment to take drastic measures just to stay afloat. The company, known for its Evercade line of handheld consoles and cartridge-based games, has been compelled to hoard critical parts years in advance, spending all available cash reserves to secure inventory before costs climb even higher.
Evercade devices range from $70 to $200, with individual game cartridges selling for $30. This pricing model appeals to retro gaming enthusiasts who value the tangible experience of collecting and playing classic titles from physical media. However, the economics behind that model are now under severe strain. In a recent interview with FRVR, CEO Andrew Byatt explained the company’s survival strategy. “We bought as much as we could in terms of cash flow,” he said. “We bought as many cartridge chips, as much RAM, and as much processors and all the rest of it.”
Blaze Entertainment has already secured what it believes it will need through the next year. Byatt confirmed, “We’ve gone ahead and we’ve bought the majority of the cartridge chips [for] 2027. We’ve just done that… but on the hardware side we’re going to be waiting and seeing and buying as we come towards the right periods. We’ve gone very early on cartridges as that’s kind of the lifeblood of the business.”
The cartridges themselves vary in memory capacity from 128MB to 1GB. Blaze tries to keep pricing consistent across all titles, but that is becoming increasingly difficult. “The 512 [megabytes] are more expensive [now] than the 1GB chips were…and the 1GB ones are very, very expensive right now,” Byatt noted. The disruption extends beyond memory chips. The company told FRVR that every link in the supply chain has been thrown into disarray.
Where manufacturers once hoped RAM prices would eventually stabilize, many now expect the situation to worsen over the next several years. The driving force is the relentless race among AI companies to improve models and expand data centers. A Valve engineer recently warned, “Honestly, it’s still getting worse. 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.”
Byatt noted that Evercade launched during the pandemic, a period already defined by inflated prices and broken supply chains. But he says the current crisis is far more severe. “It’s bigger than anything else that’s happened,” he said. “It’s bigger than [when] we had massive freight costs.” He added, “We didn’t sort of have a life before covid pricing to compare against. So we were in 2020 onwards, but this is vastly different to everything else we’ve ever seen, actually.”
(Source: Kotaku)
