Legacy of the Dark Knight; the Expensive Future of Gaming

There is a point where I think people stop using the Luigi memes as jokes, and people start taking hammers to property. I’m not advocating for it, I’m just saying what will happen as a result of this push for AI data centers and the massive increase in price for RAM, driving people insane. The latest victim seems to be TT Games’ LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, easily the most interesting LEGO game in a long while.

Well, recently, some specs have come up on Steam for LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, and they are rather interesting. Yes, it is a long way out from release for these specs to be finalized, as the game releases towards the end of May, but I think these specs are worth talking about now anyway.

I think the reason it may be worth talking about now more than ever is the fact that we’re talking about a LEGO game, and typically speaking, the target audience is parents and younger kids. Or the obscenely nostalgic, but that’s another conversation. The last LEGO game released in 2022, and it was Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. An i5-6600, 8GB of RAM, GTX 780, and 40GB of storage, in terms of minimum PC specs, that’s older than the hills, but makes sense for the market the LEGO games are in.

LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight‘s minimum specs at the time of writing are an i5-9600K, 16 GB of RAM, an RTX 2070 with 8GB of VRam, and 50GB of storage. That’s about 3-4 years of an upgrade. Doesn’t sound too bad, but again, it is the audience and the state of upgrades right now. The recommended specs, however, tell a different story: An i7-12700K, 32GB of RAM, an RTX 3080 with 10 GB of VRam, and 50GB of storage. Between Star Wars and Batman, that’s a 5-6 year level of upgrades.

I’ve seen word that this is a wide net cast of specs and will be narrowed down and refined closer to launch in May, but it is still not a good prospect. I had David (a fellow PG team member) spec up some rough prices for me about RAM alone, and if we’re talking about this in the US specifically, roughly speaking, DDR4 RAM is $220-$280 for 32GB. DDR5 will range anywhere between $325 and $450. Take that to a PC repair shop, and it is easily $500-$600 minimum for installs. Closer to $900 or more if you need to upgrade your motherboard as well.

I’ll not pretend that I am some guru when it comes to PC parts and specs; I’m the furthest from it. However, seeing this, it just seems like we’re all being marched towards one evil or the other when it comes to PC gaming with this news. Either you’re forced into cloud gaming, which I’ve voiced an opinion on before, or you’re forced into console gaming. If either is your preference, power to you, but gaming in general has never been a one-size-fits-all sort of hobby.

It is not lost on me that this was the discord between players talking about Football Manager several months ago. However, I’d argue that the specs for FM24 were so old that if they were a teenager in Essex, they’d be a great-grandparent by now. Is there a larger jump between 2008’s GeForce 9600M GT and 2015’s GTX 960 than between GTX 780 and the RTX 3080? Yes. That said, operating systems have higher minimum requirement specs than FM24 did.

If this is the start of 32GB of RAM becoming normal, that’s going to price out a lot of people from PC gaming. Not just PC gaming, but whole games themselves. Not because of X, Y, or Z personal issues, but because of this push by tech companies for their AI data centers, so they can speed up the death of the planet. Whole RAM and graphics card manufacturers are dropping consumer products from their lineups in favor of selling chips that haven’t been made yet, to tech companies with data centers that haven’t been built yet, for a speculative market that very few people want.

The reason 32GB of RAM is so expensive is this drop-off in manufacturing. Let’s not forget, we’re talking about LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight as the shark jump here, a game with a target audience of parents with kids, an expense that’s already a burden as is in this economy. A majority of parents will play with their kids on a console. I get it! However, even then, the upgrades alone for PCs are the same price or more than buying a console and the game itself for some people. If this is the future of gaming, this is a dire look at the future of PC gaming as a whole.