PS5, Xbox Series X
Sony/MS
Yesterday, Sony announced that it would implement a price hike for the PS5 in many regions outside the US, citing inflation and other economic indicators:
“We are seeing high global inflation rates, as well as adverse currency trends, affecting consumers and creating pressure on many industries,” Sony said. “Based on these difficult economic conditions, SIE has taken the difficult decision to increase the recommended retail price (RPP) of 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 the regions mentioned, but in general it is a price increase of about 50 USD for both the digital and disc models.
So global inflation is affecting not just Sony and PlayStation, but everyone, so naturally other companies are following suit, right?
Not exactly. The only hardware we’ve seen increase in price for vaguely similar reasons is Meta and its Quest headphones. But Nintendo has previously said it has no plans to raise Switch prices, and now, when asked for its response to Sony’s move by Windows Central, Microsoft was pretty unequivocal about what was happening with the Xbox .
“We are constantly evaluating our business to offer our fans great gaming options. Our Xbox Series S MSRP remains at $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 would have said anything if it was a short-term plan. So why is Sony the only one in the console space to do this?
Sony, while a big company, is still dwarfed by Microsoft, a market cap of $100 billion versus $2 trillion, with a company able to eat some losses on a hardware offering for a while if it needs, while Sony is more affected by economic factors. like this.
Sony also believes that demand is so high for the PS5, which still sells out instantly with every restock, that the price increase won’t mean a drop in sales or cause them to miss targets. In a normal generation, that might not be true, but the paucity of the PS5 is the stuff of legend right now, and Sony clearly sees an opportunity here.
That said, the counter argument here is that Sony made the PS5 profitable incredibly quickly after launch, and now, the first time economic forces have brought it down, their response is to pass that cost directly onto consumers , which is rubbing off a bit. people the wrong way. I guess I can see that argument, but I’m also not exactly going to see Microsoft as benevolent for not doing it just because they have more money than God to burn.
It’s probably not the last time we’ll see weirdness like this in the industry 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 simply thought they could. So we’ll see how this plays out over time.
Update: Nintendo has now released a new comment about how they aren’t raising prices either, due to inflation or other issues:
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