

- The price Sony and MS pay for RAM will keep going up regardless of whether there is a hardware refresh or not. So keeping the old version won’t keep consumer costs down. If they don’t refresh the cost increases will just look sillier.
- They avoid having to search for time on older process nodes while fabs try to migrate to newer ones by updating periodically.




There definitely is some amount of expenditure by valve. I don’t know if its 30% worth. For multiplayer games they provide a server/client DDOS protection and traffic optomization service though it is opt in by the developer through an api. The other option for this tends to be a “contact sales” priced product from cloudflare. There is also some of proton’s development, some linux graphics driver work, and workshop support though I suspect hosting and content moderation expenditure there is fairly minimal.