A $25 retro cartridge just got more expensive because of AI GPUs. Here's the actual link

Blaze Entertainment is raising prices on Evercade cartridges and its Super Pocket handheld across the UK and EU this month. On its own, a small hardware company's price update isn't news. What makes it worth a second look is the reason: this is the same root cause we just covered in Nvidia's RTX 50 Super delay, showing up in a completely different, far cheaper corner of the hardware world.

The actual mechanism

Evercade cartridges and the Super Pocket both depend on commodity memory and flash storage — the same category of components caught up in 2026's DRAM and NAND price spike, driven by AI datacenter demand pulling supply away from consumer electronics. It's the identical economic root as the GDDR7 pricing that's holding up Nvidia's RTX 50 Super launch: when memory fabs can sell everything they make to buyers who aren't price-sensitive, the components in a $25 cartridge and a $2,000 GPU get squeezed by the same shortage, just at wildly different scales.

We have absorbed rising costs across manufacturing, components and freight for as long as possible, but this is no longer feasible. — Andrew Byatt, Blaze Entertainment CEO

Why the US is untouched — for now

Blaze says recent reductions in US import tariffs offset the component cost increase enough to hold American pricing steady. That makes this a regional story today, not a universal one — but it means US pricing is now net-balancing two moving variables (component costs and tariffs) instead of one, which is a less stable position than it looks.

The pattern worth watching isn't Evercade specifically. If DRAM and flash pricing pressure doesn't ease, every affordable handheld built on commodity memory — the entire budget retro and emulation handheld category, not just Blaze's lineup — is next in line for the same conversation. This is the leading edge of a supply-chain story, not an isolated business decision.