As far as hardware goes nowadays, the Evercade line of handhelds and home consoles has proven remarkably affordable. Even after recent price hikes to specific product lines, the Evercade brand is still an affordable market to jump into, but it’s been a struggle for Blaze Entertainment.
While the spotlight is currently on higher-power machines, such as Valve’s Steam Deck, when it comes to price hikes and cost of manufacturing, the reality is that lower-power devices are facing similar issues. In an interview with FRVR, Blaze Entertainment CEO Andrew Byatt explained that Evercade production has always existed within some kind of manufacturing crisis.
“We were a brand born in COVID,” Byatt said. “We didn’t sort of have a life before COVID pricing to compare against. So we were in 2020 onwards, but this is vastly different to everything else we’ve ever seen, actually.”
In a similar form to the Nintendo Switch 2, Evercade is a cartridge-based system, although every cartridge for the platform has less memory than a modern AAA game. As a device designed to play retro games, currently up to PS1 and Nintendo 64, cartridges max out at around 1GB of storage, but as the industry fights over scraps of memory, even those tiny tiny amounts of flash storage are becoming quite expensive.
As prices started to rise last year, Byatt explained that the team prepared for the year by buying as many components as possible. “We bought as much as we could in terms of cash flow,” Byatt said. “We bought as many cartridge chips, as much RAM, and as much processors and all the rest of it.” Unfortunately, prices have only continued to climb as the so-called RAMaggedon continues on, and Blaze has been forced to follow a similar trend to last year.
“We’ve gone ahead and we’ve bought the majority of the cartridge chips [for] 2027,” Byatt told us. “We’ve just done that… but on the hardware side we’re going to be waiting and seeing and buying as we come towards the right periods. We’ve gone very early on cartridges as that’s kind of the lifeblood of the business.”
The component crisis isn’t just affecting the fabrication of memory chips, either. “It’s starting to affect PCBs and boards and theres copper… I mean, COVID, we experienced things like they’d run out of sand for the silica for the glasses. It was like, ‘you run out of sand? That’s ridiculous.’”
With the sheer jump in prices for memory chips. Byatt explains that Evercade has at least been able to equalise its pricing for cartridges. Before, new carts would vary in price as the smaller 128MB and 512MB carts or the more expensive 1GB carts. As the price for any memory has jumped up, the price difference between these tiny sizes has essentially been eliminated.
“We’ve kind of equalised because it’s not really making much difference between 128 [megabytes] and 1 Gig[abyte],” we were told. “It’s all just really very difficult to get memory basically. The 512 [megabytes] are more expensive [now] than the 1GB chips were… and the 1GB ones are very, very expensive right now.”
While Evercade has never existed in a world where some form of component or shipping crisis wasn’t occurring, the ongoing memory shortage is the worst problem they’ve faced yet. “This has been the biggest impact,” Byatt said. “It’s bigger than anything else that’s happened. It’s bigger than [when] we had massive freight costs.”
There’s a hope that the market will at least stabilise so that every company, Evercade included, will at least be able to find a new normal. However, with memory prices expected to skyrocket again in the second half of 2026, that new normal may take a while to arrive.
