Larian’s Divinity Early Access Strategy Based On Hardware Costs Forcing

Divinity optimization has become an unexpected priority for Larian Studios as surging hardware prices disrupt long-term development plans for the studio’s next role-playing game. According to Larian CEO Swen Vincke, the escalating cost of RAM and SSD storage is forcing the team to carry out deep technical work far earlier than intended, reshaping how Divinity will progress through early access.

The comments were made during an interview with TheGamer, where Vincke described a hardware market unlike anything the studio has previously faced. Memory and storage pricing, long considered predictable enough to plan around, has become volatile due to global shortages and the accelerating demands of AI infrastructure. That instability has immediate consequences for studios building large-scale PC games designed to live in early access for years.

“Interestingly, another 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,” Vincke said.

For Larian, the problem is not limited to cost alone. Game architecture for a long-running early access release must anticipate future hardware norms while still running well on today’s systems. Traditionally, studios could rely on steady improvements in consumer hardware and declining prices to absorb some inefficiencies early on. Vincke says those assumptions no longer hold.

“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,” he said. “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.”

That shift affects both scheduling and creative priorities. Optimization is typically deferred until later stages of development, once systems, visuals, and content have stabilized. Doing that work earlier can slow iteration and lock in technical decisions sooner than planned. For a studio known for reactive development and systemic depth, that trade-off is significant.

The wider cause sits well beyond Larian’s control. Memory manufacturers are redirecting capacity toward AI servers that rely on high-bandwidth memory and massive storage arrays. While consumer RAM and data-center memory are not identical, they compete for shared manufacturing resources. As AI investment continues to climb into the hundreds of billions, availability for consumer hardware tightens.

The result is a market where individual RAM sticks can approach the cost of entire current-generation consoles, and SSD prices show signs of similar pressure. For PC-focused developers, especially those targeting wide system compatibility, those increases translate directly into design constraints.

The situation has created an awkward overlap with Larian’s recent admission that it uses generative AI tools in limited parts of its workflow. That disclosure sparked criticism, given AI’s role in driving the very hardware shortages affecting the studio. Vincke addressed the concern by clarifying the scope of that usage, emphasizing that it does not replace artists or generate final assets.

“We’re not ‘pushing hard’ for or replacing concept artists with AI,” Vincke said. “We use AI tools to explore references, just like we use Google and art books. At the very early ideation stages, we use it as a rough outline for composition, which we replace with original concept art. There is no comparison.”

The explanation aligns Larian with several other large studios that have quietly adopted similar tools for early experimentation rather than production content. Still, the irony remains that even minimal participation in AI workflows ties developers to an ecosystem reshaping hardware economics across the industry.

For players, the impact will likely surface in system requirements and performance targets earlier in Divinity’s early access cycle. More aggressive optimization could mean broader hardware support at launch, but it may also slow feature rollout as engineering resources shift toward performance stability. Vincke framed the challenge as manageable, if unwelcome, and stressed that adaptation is part of game development’s reality.

“So it’s challenging, but it’s video games,” he said. — Swen Vincke

As memory and storage prices continue to fluctuate, Divinity’s development may offer a clear example of how external market forces now shape creative and technical decisions long before release. For Larian, Divinity optimization is no longer a late-stage polish task. It is becoming a foundational requirement, driven less by ambition than by the cost of the hardware players will need to run the game at all.

Read also, Larian Sets Boundaries On AI As Divinity Moves Into Full Production, as the studio outlines how generative tools will be limited to internal support while all shipped content remains fully human-made during Divinity’s transition into full-scale development.