Latest Steam Hardware Survey Shows Just How Hard PC Gamers Have Been Hit by AI

The entirety of 2026 has been marked by continually rising hardware prices, and now, according to the latest Steam Hardware Survey, the average gaming PC is starting to embrace older hardware once more.

The October Steam Hardware Survey went live yesterday, and it's clear that the state of PC hardware is causing gamers to be a bit more frugal with their builds. The biggest sign of this is in the RAM configuration, where systems using 16GB of RAM have now taken the top spot, rising 3.6% to cover 41.42% of the Steam user base. Users with a 32GB configuration have diminished at the same time, dropping 5.16%, to cover 37.06% of Steam users.

But it's not just RAM that people are cutting back on. For graphics cards, the RTX 3060 has reclaimed its top spot, growing 0.08%, and now representing 3.62% of all Steam users. That doesn't seem like a lot, but considering the huge amount of GPUs that exist, it's a significant proportion. It probably doesn't hurt that you can get an RTX 3060 used on eBay for around $250–300 right now. For CPUs, 8-core CPUs saw a decline in favor of 4-core CPUs, which rose 1.57% to cover 12.36% of PCs with Steam.

It's not hard to see why people are opting for less powerful PCs right now. Pretty much every PC component has gone up in price over the last year, to the point where high-end GPUs are flat-out disappearing from retailer's listings.

Meanwhile, Samsung's latest earnings report suggests that the RAM crisis is only going to get worse next year, as that company gears up to forward even more memory to AI data centers. And while all of this is going on, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even came out and suggested that it's 'quite terrible' for people to have RAM in their own computers.

It's not just gaming PCs that are getting hit by this ongoing RAM crisis. The PS5 Pro sold out ahead of GTA 6, prompting retailers to charge upwards of $1,399 for used consoles, and Microsoft started asking people to sell unused Xboxes. In the face of all this, it becomes less shocking when rumors appear suggesting that the next-generation Xbox is going to cost $1,800.

But at least when faced with these higher RAM prices, PC builders have the choice to opt for a lower-end configuration, and that's exactly what's happening with the latest Steam Hardware Survey.