Waiting for "GTA6"? How to choose mobile games amid Apple’s price hikes

On Saturday afternoon I finally turned on my PC, just sat down and my phone popped up another piece of news: Xiaomi raised prices, OV raised prices, Honor also raised prices. Looking at this old device in my hand that’s barely holding up under Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, I suddenly felt a bit torn: should I swap it for a big-screen phone that can handle mobile games before GTA 6 even launches?

As an office worker whose only phone time is on the subway commute, my criteria for choosing a phone are extremely simple: can it run mobile games smoothly for three years, can I boot it up on weekends without it turning into a PowerPoint, and is the price-performance ratio worthy of the two or three takeout meals’ money it costs me. This recent wave of price hikes in memory chips has dragged all phone manufacturers into the fray; Android brands all around are adjusting prices, giving people the same pressure as if subway fares suddenly doubled.

The root cause of this round of price hikes is actually that artificial intelligence has basically emptied out the global memory chip supply. Servers, computing power, AI phones are all rushing in, and as a result, the consumer electronics side is being bitten back by the supply chain. This hits especially hard for mobile gamers like us who care the most about storage and RAM—we’re basically standing right in the line of fire. The news says that this high memory price level may last at least until the end of 2027. In other words, for the next two or three years, if you want to buy a cheap, large-memory phone, there’s basically not much hope.

That said, in times like this, the big players actually look more like that colleague who has a yearly meal card—others pay per meal, while they can spread the cost out by the month. Brands like Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, and Honor have all already announced or completed price hikes, whereas Apple still hasn’t officially announced any price increase; they even briefly ran a promotion earlier this year on newly launched models, which is quite intriguing. Analysts also mentioned that Apple has chosen to digest part of the cost itself in exchange for a bigger market share, which is a pretty shrewd move from a business perspective.

What’s even more extreme is that there’s word Apple is now sweeping the market with high bids, grabbing all the mobile DRAM it can get its hands on—like a company booking out an entire KTV for a team-building event, leaving no private rooms for anyone else. This approach will squeeze their margins to some extent, but the upside is straightforward: competitors that want to launch high-RAM, large-storage models may face higher costs or even supply shortages. For those of us who love big, heavy mobile games, this could mean that high-end Android phones will be more expensive in the future and harder to get at a good price.

From the perspective of an office worker who just wants to lie down and play games on the weekend, what’s the play right now? If you’re planning to change phones this year, and your goal is to play large-scale games smoothly for the next three years—like Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, plus future cloud games—then I’d lean toward gritting your teeth and going for a configuration with enough storage. Memory price hikes are already a reality, and manufacturers will generally recoup costs through new device pricing. The short-term discounts you see now are basically the last window they’re offering to people still hesitating. Once the new generation of flagships and the rumored foldables arrive, a significant jump in launch prices is something the whole industry is expecting.

Here’s how I’d put it: if your current phone can still hold on for another year and you only play lighter mobile games, like auto chess, card games, match-3, then you can keep waiting and watching. After all, commute time is limited; spending a big chunk of money for a 10% improvement in experience is like taking a cab just to go one subway stop—questionable value. But if you’re already seeing obvious frame drops, your storage bar is frequently red, and every time you update a game you have to delete videos and apps, then I’d suggest catching one or two sales this year, picking a mid-to-high-end device (no need to chase the absolute top spec), and choosing the largest storage option you can accept, aiming to make this one phone last you until the high-price cycle ends around 2027.

At the end of the day, for weekend-only players like us, the phone is already a hybrid of “handheld console + social tool.” Apple’s choice to rely on its services business to support hardware profits and keep phone prices from scaring users away in the short term is essentially about keeping you in its ecosystem and then slowly making money back later through subscriptions and cloud services. From a player’s standpoint, the math is brutally practical: how long can this phone stay smooth, does the gaming experience match the value of your weekend rest time, and compared with that still-unreleased “ultimate console” for GTA 6, whether upgrading the device you use every single day might actually be the better deal.