Are the rapidly rising prices of electronics and components having any affect on game dev? Is it reducing the frequency of workstation upgrades? Are games being developed now with expectations of players upgrading their PCs and Consoles less often?
It affects our target spec more than it does the development process.
We usually get new workstations on an as-needed basis - the primary reason I got a [workstation upgrade last year] was because I was put on a project and it was taking too long for me to build and run the packaged game. Because the studio wanted to increase my productivity, they gave me a new workstation. The effectiveness over time works out - if I spend 30 fewer minutes each day waiting for builds to complete, they're getting an extra day's worth of work out of me every 3 weeks or so. That turns out to be around 3 weeks of additional dev work a year. At my compensation level, that's worth over $12,000 pretty easily. A new workstation in my hands pays for more than itself in a year. Also, each studio has at most a few hundred developers. The cost of workstation hardware and maintenance per year is small compared to how much it costs to keep us employed (compensation, benefits, taxes, etc.), even with the ridiculous GPU and RAM prices.
Game projects always have a min spec, a "target" spec, and an "enthusiast" spec. The "target" spec is usually a few steps behind the leading edge, even a few steps behind our dev workstations. If our game is releasing cross-platform, the "target" spec for PC tends to be roughly parity to perform as well as the lead console we're aiming to release on (PS5, XBOne, etc.). If costs continue to rise, most developers will adjust their targets toward the majority of what's out there. A handful of "prestige" games may try to target the higher spec machines out there, but we generally fish where the fish are - we sell games aimed at the kind of machines players have.
Remember, we want players to be able to play our games and have a good experience, even if they don't have the latest and greatest hardware. I suspect the current era of rising hardware costs will be similar to the era of high cost and low availability of PS5s and XBOnes. Since there weren't that many people buying and playing games on those hardware, we kept making games for the previous generation for an extra few years. I suspect we'll do something similar for the next few years as well.
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