Time was, long ago, that you could expect gaming hardware to drop in price over the course of its lifespan. However, it appears those days have long passed for consoles, as Sony has announced that it's raising the prices on PlayStation 5 consoles across the range in the US of A.
"Similar to many global businesses, we continue to navigate a challenging economic environment", says Sony in a post on its PlayStation blog. "As a result, we've made the difficult decision to increase the recommended retail price for PlayStation 5 consoles in the US starting on August 21."
The RRPs in question have gone up by roughly $50 a piece, meaning that the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition is now $500, the regular PS5 is $550, and the PlayStation 5 Pro is a whopping $750. Sure, the Pro wasn't exactly cheap to begin with, but that extra $50 really does make a psychological difference, doesn't it?
The "challenging economic environment" of which Sony speaks is multifaceted. For a start, the Trump administration's current tariff policy has thrown a lot of electronics manufacturers for a loop. US importers of Japanese goods currently have to pay a 15% tariff on the products they sell, and that's a fair amount of extra cost to absorb.
Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki openly discussed the possibility of manufacturing PlayStation 5 consoles in the US in order to beat the tariffs earlier this year, but said at the time that Sony wasn't in "such a critical situation" as to pull the emergency cord and begin those plans immediately. Given this announcement, I wonder if said plan is currently under more serious consideration.
However, while the regular PS5 is no longer a loss leader (although it certainly was when it was first released), it's still not a cheap piece of hardware to manufacture in general. Sony has previously struggled with a scarcity of components for the console, and while that appears to have eased in recent years, it's still made up of a collection of reasonably powerful hardware.
Hardware which, over time, is costing more to make. The cost per transistor has risen on all sorts of chips over the last few years, and the hardware inside the PS5 is far from immune. Throw in a hefty whack of inflation, a relatively sluggish console market, and a machine that's starting to look ever-so-slightly long in the tooth (even in Pro form), and Sony looks to have a complicated economic problem on its hands.
For now, it's decided that price rises might be the answer, at least in the US market to offset those pesky tariffs. But with the PlayStation 6 estimated to be at least a couple of years away, it'll be interesting to see how Sony moves in relation to these conditions.
Rumours persist of a new handheld in the same vein as the PlayStation Vita of old, which could go some way to shoring up console division profits. A ROG Xbox Ally competitor, perhaps, with the focus moving towards handheld and cloud-based gaming? I wouldn't be entirely surprised.
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