RAMageddon has reportedly hit a new benchmark. Halo Studios did not fire a bunch of people after shipping the remake (yet). Sometimes piracy can help spread the word for a breakout indie hit. That’s right, a wild Kotaku Checkpoint has appeared for August 7, 2026, where it’s been a long week and I’m craving a $20 burrito. Let’s wrap up some loose ends and get out of here!
Hope you’re not looking to buy RAM in the next 18 months
It’s all gone, according to a new report by DigiTimes (via Tweaktown). The Taiwanese outlet, citing industry insiders, claims that Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have all sold out of their DRAM and high bandwidth memory (HBM) through 2027. Everyone called dibs. There’s no additional supply. Game over, man.
The ongoing shortages have been reported for months, with AI companies buying up parts for data centers in a war to see who can turn the internet into a lawless cyberhacking hellscape first. This has forced other manufacturers whose products rely on memory and storage components, like gaming hardware makers, to keep jacking up their prices. No one expects this madness to end in 2027, with some analysts saying prices could keep going up into 2028.
The solution? Start selling hardware with less RAM, apparently.
Black Ops is king this summer
Alinea Analytics estimated that the surprise ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 for PS4 and PS5 have sold a combined 11.2 million copies. The games had previously been stuck on PS3 for PlayStation users (they’ve remained available through backwards compatibility for fans on Xbox). What was particularly striking about that data point was that it seemingly blew the Halo remake, the franchise’s first time ever being playable on PlayStation, out of the water. Alinea Analystics estimated that the Xbox franchise only sold 351,000 copies on PS5 in July. And that was a full-blown visual overhaul from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5, including new missions. Black Ops 1 and 2, seemingly rushed out to pad soft sales for last year’s Black Ops 7, received minimal improvements.
No mass layoff at Halo Studios
It began circulating earlier in the week that some of the people who worked on Halo: Campaign Evolved were laid off. While that is true, speculation that it was a mass layoff event following the game’s event was not. A source inside Xbox clarified to GamesBeat that people posting on LinkedIn about being cut from Halo Studios were outside contractors rather than full-time staff. “No layoffs have occurred at Halo Studios,” the source said. “There are often external contractor shifts that happen after a game ships. This is what people are noticing.”
Some cuts at Crossfire developer That’s No Moon?
The studio founded by industry veterans back in 2021 recently revealed its debut game, a new entry in the multiplayer shooter series Crossfire with a very intricate cover system. Some of the people working on the game, however, recently shared on LinkedIn that they were laid off, according to IGN. The studio has yet to comment on the reason for the cuts or how many people were impacted. Crossfire is in development for console and PC but doesn’t currently have a release date.
Doom‘s unlikely reliance on Taiwanese pirates
QuakeCon 2026 is going on right now in Texas, and id Software co-founder John Romero shared an interesting anecdote about Doom‘s early history. He was elaborating on how the shareware model of the early ’80s and ’90s, which encouraged people to pass around incomplete copies of the FPS, led to lots of piracy. Boxes would pop up on store shelves with rogue copies of the game inside. That wasn’t entirely a bad thing, though. In fact, it helped get the game distributed to a far wider audience then ever would have happened through official channels.
“We were totally happy with that,” Romero explained (via PC Gamer). “We were doing so much work just getting the game out. We knew in Taiwan that they were copying it: 100 percent, that was the market back then. So we contacted the biggest pirates there and went, ‘Can you buy boxes from us? Really cheap. Really really cheap.’ So they bought tons of boxes off of us, so it would be legitimate.”
He continued, “Get it out there, make them feel good. We made money when people would actually order the rest of the game. We didn’t try to make money off the shareware [version].”
