Latest in what is undoubtedly a long, long series of unfortunate announcements in the games industry, Valve has officially confirmed that the Steam Deck is going out of stock due to the global memory and storage shortage. While that's bad news for anyone looking to buy a handheld gaming PC right now, it might have even bigger implications for the eventual PC release of Grand Theft Auto VI.
A new disclaimer on the Steam Deck store page reads: "Steam Deck OLED may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages. Steam Deck LCD 256GB is no longer in production, and once sold out will no longer be available." At the time of writing, all three Steam Deck models are sold out in the United States, though stock remains available in the UK and parts of Europe. The shortages aren't a surprise to anyone who's been following the PC hardware space in 2026.
Memory prices have surged and will continue to skyrocket, driven almost entirely by demand from AI data centers gobbling up the global supply of DRAM, NAND, and HBM components. The same crisis has already delayed Valve's upcoming Steam Machine, forced Nvidia to reportedly cut gaming GPU production by up to 40%, and pushed next-generation consoles from both Sony and Microsoft into uncertain territory. So where do Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive figure into all of this?
GTA 6 is currently confirmed only for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with a November 19, 2026 release date. A PC release has not been announced, though Rockstar's history with staggered launches, with Grand Theft Auto V arriving on PC roughly 18 months after its console debut and Red Dead Redemption 2 arriving roughly a year later, points to a 2027 or 2028 window. The current hardware crisis gives Take-Two and Rockstar a convenient, entirely defensible reason to push that window even further.
If GTA 6 launches on PC in late 2027, it arrives into a market where GPU availability is uncertain, memory prices are still elevated, and the install base of hardware capable of running a next-gen Rockstar title at any reasonable fidelity is smaller than it would otherwise be. That translates directly into fewer sales, and Rockstar doesn't release games to underperform. They release games to break records, and launching a PC port into a hardware drought is not how you break records.
If even Valve is struggling, imagine what the downstream effects look like for the average PC gamer trying to build or upgrade a rig ahead of a GTA 6 launch. SSDs are getting more expensive. RAM kits are climbing. GPUs are being diverted to AI workloads. The entire PC ecosystem is under more pressure than ever.
For context, GTA V remains one of the most-played games on Steam, with concurrent player counts that still rival those of games released a decade after it. The Enhanced Edition and later on, the Expanded and Enhanced Edition, have guaranteed that GTA V maintains its relevance. That said, GTA V is also a game originally designed for the PS3 and Xbox 360 - running it on mid-range hardware in 2026 is trivially easy.
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GTA 6, built on RAGE 9 and designed from the ground up for current-gen consoles, is going to be a very different story. If the system requirements land anywhere near what analysts are projecting, a significant chunk of the current PC gaming audience simply won't be able to run it, at least not at the visual quality Rockstar would want associated with the game.
That said, there's a flip side to this. Instead of using the hardware crisis as an excuse to delay, Rockstar could use it as an opportunity. If the studio optimizes GTA 6 to run well on modern low-to-mid-range hardware, particularly the kind of specs that the majority of Steam's user base actually has, it would generate enormous goodwill. A GTA 6 PC port that runs smoothly on a mainstream GPU and doesn't require 32GB of RAM would make for quite the statement.
To be fair, Rockstar's track record with PC optimization is mixed. While GTA V's PC port was excellent, Red Dead Redemption 2's PC launch was rough, plagued by crashes, stuttering, and compatibility issues that took months to iron out. The results with a hypothetical GTA 6 port could go either way.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has repeatedly described GTA 6 as an attempt to create "the most extraordinary title anyone's ever seen in the history of entertainment." That's a lofty promise, but if the entire electronics hardware industry doesn't improve by the time the port is ready, even the most extraordinary game in entertainment history is going to have a hard time finding an audience that can actually play it.
The marketing campaign for GTA 6 is expected to begin this summer, and Zelnick has confirmed that Rockstar's approach will be handcrafted rather than AI-generated. Google's Project Genie already spooked investors earlier this year, and now the AI industry's insatiable demand for memory is threatening the viability of the very platform that GTA 6 will eventually need to succeed on.
For now, the console version of GTA 6 remains unaffected. Sony has reportedly secured enough PS5 stock to handle the anticipated demand spike, and the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S are not facing the same component constraints as the PC market.
The Steam Deck going out of stock might seem like a niche hardware story, but it's a symptom of a global memory crisis that could affect the eventual GTA 6 PC launch in ways nobody would have predicted just two years ago. Whether that means a longer delay, a more aggressive optimization push, or some combination of both, the one thing that's clear is that GTA 6 will launch into a PC market that's going to look very different from the one anyone imagined.
On that note, Grand Theft Auto Online remains officially unsupported on Steam Deck and other Linux-powered handheld devices following the release of the anti-cheat software, BattleEye, in 2024. Other Grand Theft Auto titles, including GTA V, remain unaffected.
