The CEO can reinvest his yachts to fabs his own.

They need to start hitting them with such steep amounts it hurts shareholders.

That would fix them overnight. ( This is all companies that break law's)

Imagine how much good will and long-term profit

They'd generate loads of good will, which would be forgotten in an instant as soon as a something better or cheaper came along. Consumers are fickle.

Yeah but they won't, because good will access loyalty isn't worth 10x profits right now, today.

Some would probably even argue that not extracting maximum profits today would leave them at a disadvantage against their competitors who are investing huge profits back into the business.

To be clear I'm not saying I agree with any of this, I'm just saying don't get your hopes up because at the end of the day they are all businesses.

Not much at all. Consumers are cheap, their requirements vary wildly and they are hard to deal with and buy in small quantities.

It would just be out of stock immediately though

There is too much centralization in the chain. Decades ago there were lots of memory manufacturers. But as the markets matured, and the work became more sophisticated, and big swings happened in the markets, consolidation happened. And many manufacturers just went away.

But yeah, you would think there would be room for that still. I still agree with you.

A lot also don't, the low common denominator don't care about anything other then their consumer habits or if it affects them in the here and now.

Unfortunately there aren't a lot of companies manufacturing ram, and the handful that exists are all members of the cartel, and it takes decades to set up a new production. Also the cartel corporations are making much more selling to datacenters than they ever did selling to consumers.

Pretty sure thats actually illegal in the US because you are legally obligated to do what makes the board and investors the most money.

I don't know about that. My time in customer service has taught me that it's actually pretty hard to win customers over.

From my understanding, Valve would need to be hundreds of times more wealthy to be able to even consider manufacturing their own DRAM.

Edit: notably, this article seems to suggest that after significant government investmemt and with an already well-established knowledge and IP base, a fab costs around $15 billion dollars and optimisticly, a decade of construction. Given that Valve is starting from scratch, the price will be much higher. Chinese companies, backed by the Chinese government and using significant amounts of corporate espionage, have been trying to achive this for about 20 years, and are only just starting to catch up, nonetheless one (relatively) small software company.

And Kotaku should write their own articles instead of ripping off Gamers Nexus

If they start building a factory right this second, they might be able to get their first chips out in 2031.

More RAM manufacturing plants are being built because of the demand, but it'll be years before any of them produce anything.

I mean these companies have the solution. Collude and price gouge for maximum shareholder and executive value. Just how capitalism was designed to do.