Grand Theft Auto 6 Might Be The Last Video Game You Ever Own

I’ve been watching in horror these past few months as the prices of RAM and storage solutions have gone through the roof. I’m sure if I’d invested a little wisely last year it wouldn’t be horror I’d be looking on with, but pure glee. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Instead, it seems like the demand for AI is going to destroy video gaming as we know it for the average consumer. Perhaps that seems a little hyperbolic, but it pays to be pessimistic when megacorporations like Nvidia - who have a finger in both manufacturing and consumer products - start buying up vast supplies of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), graphics DRAM (GDDR), and low-power DRAM (LPDDR) from key suppliers to power their sickeningly greedy datacentres.

NEWS RAM burning money in front of mountains of AI.

Sandisk, an American producer of solid state drives (SSDs), has seen a stock price increase of almost 1,300 percent in the past year. Micron Technology, another American company that manufactures various types of computer storage and memory, is up over 300 percent. These astronomical increases are a canary in the data center for what’s next for the industry. The price of memory is only going up until the AI bubble pops, and that’s if the AI bubble pops at all.

It’s not only supply and demand, but the inability to produce the required materials needed for AI expansion at the rate at which the industry is growing. It’s impossible to sustain. We might see things level out in the future as chip, memory, and storage production increases, but the shortages will have a seismic knock-on effect for consumer products well into the next decade.

This has already started to have an impact on consumers, particularly those who like video games. The Steam Deck is perpetually out of stock, and the price of RAM, SSDs and GPUs have started to slowly increase as well. (more links here to our articles covering price hikes) It will eventually price the majority of people out of upgrading older systems, and as video games become ever more unwieldy and massive, you only need more processing power to run them. This is where streaming comes in, and this is my prediction for the future.

You Won’t Buy Video Games Anymore

While this might be a little tinfoil hat of me, it’s no surprise that Nvidia is leaning so hard into stockpiling memory and building data centers: they have market dominance, and a play in video games already established. GeForce Now, Nvidia’s own video game streaming platform, is something I’ve always considered a neat gimmick. It doesn’t really work unless you have fast internet, and the majority of people would much rather own a video game outright rather than paying a subscription service to stream it.

Lucia and Jason from GTA 6 side-by-side with a viral AI game clip.

But what if you can’t afford a new PlayStation, or the upgrade needed to run Crimson Desert at more than 20 FPS on your old GTX 1650 Super? If video game streaming actually worked well, we could see the rise of a casual market for video game subscription services. Netflix is planning to delve further into the video game market over the next few years, but not for triple-A streaming. Its plan is more likely to be casual party games, ones that can be controlled with your mobile phone from your sofa, but it was a trailblazer for streaming trumping ownership for ease. After the death of Google Stadia, large companies are still wary of the video game streaming space.

The main limitations on streaming video games are thin margins (it’s expensive to stream a game from a data center, particularly for cooling and power generation), the impact of poor internet on your stream, and the fact that input delay is still a very big issue even in 2026. None of these make the format particularly appealing, and there’s no denying that there will always be enthusiasts and more dedicated players that keep physical gaming hardware alive. But for a casual audience? I’m not so sure.

If we jump a few decades into the future, barring any massive socio-economic collapse because of the planet succumbing to environmental disasters, I can see the improvement of data center coverage and server distance bridging the latency issue with streaming. This is all hypothetical, but if streaming is easier - and cheaper - a new generation of casual gamers subscribing to streaming platforms instead of adopting new consoles and PCs is more than possible.

Grand Theft Auto 6 may well be the final mainstream release that will launch in the old way. People will still queue up to buy GTA6 in person, for example. Most games don’t have this sort of pull. Many people already buy digital, some games have day one patches that block prewoned sales, servers regularly go down if a game isn’t performing well, and an increasing number of titles are digital only. I’d argue the vast majority of people already don’t ‘own’ their games.

It’s a long way from heading into a Blockbuster with a sticky floor and picking up a beaten-up copy of Lego Racers to rent for the third time in two weeks. Either I’m getting old or the world is ending.