Sony will join Microsoft and Nintendo in raising US prices across its entire game console lineup, the company announced today. Pricing for all current versions of the PlayStation 5 console will increase by $50 starting tomorrow.
The price of the PS5 Digital Edition will increase from $450 to $500; the standard PS5 will increase from $500 to $550; and the PS5 Pro will increase from $700 to $750. If you've been on the fence about buying any of these, retailers like Target and Best Buy are still using the old prices as of this writing—for other console price hikes, retailers have sometimes bumped the prices up before the date announced by the manufacturer.
"Similar to many global businesses, we continue to navigate a challenging economic environment," wrote Sony Global Marketing VP Isabelle Tomatis. "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."
Sony says it's not increasing prices for games or accessories and that this round of price increases only affects consoles sold in the US.
Sony was the last of the big three console makers to raise prices this year. Microsoft raised the prices for the Xbox Series S and X consoles back in March. And Nintendo has gone through two rounds of price increases—one for Switch and Switch 2 accessories back in April and another for more accessories and Switch 1 consoles earlier this month.
All of these increases would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when it was still relatively normal for console makers to cut prices as the hardware aged. Heavy tariffs imposed by the Trump administration are the main culprit here—they make it more expensive to bring consoles into the US, and they also have downstream effects on shipping rates and the cost of manufacturing and assembling hardware with complex global supply chains. Nintendo went as far as to delay Switch 2 pre-orders and raise previously announced accessory prices directly after the administration announced a round of tariffs in April.
But there are technical explanations, too. In recent years, it has become more difficult and more expensive to squeeze more transistors into the same amount of physical space. These more efficient manufacturing processes used to make it possible to create cheaper, smaller, and cooler-running versions of game console chips, which in turn made it possible to release smaller and cheaper versions of those consoles. That has left console makers with fewer ways to cut manufacturing costs and fewer savings to pass on to consumers.
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