It won’t and here’s why…

Game development is done for known quantities, the RAM in an Xbox Series X/S, PS5/Pro, Switch, Steam Deck, now Steam Machine isn’t changing. It’s a fixed, known quantity, and they code for that.

Storage is a different issue, and can be expanded many ways, but the processors and RAM isn’t going anywhere.

If anything, what we’re going to see is an extended gaming generation where the Next Gen machines can’t be successfully launched or supported.

Upvoted for being unpopular.

I mean this would be wonderful but I’m not counting on it. I have given up with the AAA’s, there is plenty of wonderful, reasonably priced indie games what will run on a toaster. It’s a decision to buy the Good New Games Everyone Wants To Play and to build a strong enough PC to run them.

There’s also a heavy push towards AI supported development, so I would expect a lot of code to get a lot worse.

There’s a massive skill erosion in the industry going on currently, at least in the (AAA) company I work in. We’ve just switched from agile/sprints to “AI-native <something>”, which is a SDLC model that, at least from how I looked into it, doesn’t make any sense but “AI go brrrr”.

It sucks.

and that subsequently the time allowed for QA and optimization has shrunk in order to ship the product quicker

That’s definitely an issue and it’s becoming worse. But I don’t think rising RAM prices will solve it. More likely there will be an even larger split between indie and AAA games and some users will just permanently lose access to AAA because they can’t afford the hardware anymore.