PS5, Xbox Series X
Sony/MS
Yesterday, Sony announced that it would be implementing price increases for the PS5 in many regions outside the US, citing inflation and other economic indicators:
“We are seeing high rates of global inflation as well as adverse currency trends impacting consumers and putting pressure on many industries,” Sony said. “Based on these challenging economic conditions, SIE has taken the difficult decision to increase the suggested retail price (RRP) of the PlayStation 5 in select markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Asia Pacific (APAC), Latin America ( LATAM) as well as Canada.’
The price increase is different in all of the regions mentioned, but generally speaking it comes to about a $50 USD price increase for both the digital and disc models.
So, global inflation is affecting not only Sony and PlayStation, but everyone, so naturally other companies follow suit, right?
Not exactly. The only hardware we’ve seen increase in price for vaguely similar reasons is the Meta and its Quest headphones. But Nintendo has previously said it has no plans to raise Switch prices, and now, when asked about its response to Sony’s move from Windows Central, Microsoft has been fairly unequivocal about what’s happening with the Xbox.
“We are constantly evaluating our business to offer our fans great gaming options. Our suggested retail price for Xbox Series S remains $299 (£250, €300), Xbox Series X is $499 (£450, €500).”
PS5
Sony
While it’s not impossible that Xbox won’t raise prices in the future, I’m not sure they’d say anything if it was a short-term plan. So why is Sony alone in the console space as the only one doing this?
Sony, while a big company, is still dwarfed by Microsoft, $100 billion vs. $2 trillion market cap, a company that can eat some losses from a single hardware offering for a while if it needs to, while Sony is hit with -strongly by economic factors like this.
Sony also believes that demand is so high for the PS5, which still sells out instantly with every relaunch, that a price increase won’t mean a drop in sales or cause them to miss their targets. In a normal generation, that might not be true, but PS5 scarcity is the stuff of legend at this point, and Sony sees an opportunity here, obviously.
That being said, the counter-argument here is that Sony made the PS5 profitable incredibly quickly after launch, and now the first moment economic forces have caused it to slip, their response is to pass those costs directly onto consumers, which aggravates some people the wrong way. I can see that argument, I guess, but I’m also not going to look at Microsoft as well-intentioned for not doing this just because they have more money than god to burn.
This probably isn’t the last time we’ll see such industry quirks in these strange times, but it also doesn’t feel entirely out of character for Sony, the champion behind raising the prices of its video games from $60 to $70 because they just thought they could . So we’ll see how that plays out over time.
Update: Nintendo has now issued a new comment about how they’re not raising prices either, due to inflation or other issues:
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Take my science fiction novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
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