Sony has announced a $50 price hike for every console in the PlayStation 5 family in the U.S. region. This includes the PlayStation 5 physical edition, the PlayStation 5 digital edition, and the PlayStation 5 Pro consoles. These price raises will go into effect on August 21. What this will do is drive up the physical edition to $549.99, the Digital to $499.99, with the Pro now $749.99 (Remember the Pro comes as a digital console, so this price is before adding on items like a disk drive).
Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Vice President, Global Marketing, Isabelle Tomatis, released a short statement via PlayStation Blog, saying:
Similar to many global businesses, we continue to navigate a challenging economic environment. As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to increase the recommended retail price for PlayStation 5 consoles in the U.S. starting on August 21.
The announcement comes amid a turbulent global market, which hasn’t been helped in part thanks to the use of tariffs in the U.S. spearheaded by the current presidential administration, with President Donald J. Trump at the helm. Similarly, Nintendo raised the price of all models of their Nintendo Switch system in the U.S. Sony had also raised prices for the console across multiple regions earlier this year.
This news also comes at an interesting time as it overlaps with the popular video game conference Gamescom, held in Cologne, Germany, every year. Given that the company has titles like Ghost of Yotei present there, overlapping this news with the ever-busy cycle of news coming out of the event feels like poor timing. Sony has not announced price changes for other items, such as controllers or disk drives, at this time.
Microsoft has also been hit with inflation and increased hardware prices earlier this year. Despite announcing the release date for their upcoming handheld, the ROG Xbox Ally, for October 16th, the company has stated they are not ready to commit to a price point yet, stating they need more time to navigate the “Macro-economics” before deciding on a price point for the device, which will have two versions upon release.
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