Sony announces PlayStation 5 Price Hike in several regions
Sony’s diskless PlayStation 5 now costs £70 more than it did at launch
Starting today, Sony has officially increased the price of its baseline PlayStation 5 (diskless) console in Europe, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. This has increased the price of Sony’s Digital Edition console to £429.99 in the UK, £70 higher than the console’s launch pricing. Furthermore, the company has increased the price of its “standard” (includes a disk drive) console in Australia and New Zealand.
Unlike prior console generations, Sony’s PlayStation 5 console has increased in price since its launch in 2020. Sony blamed the price increase on “high inflation and fluctuating exchange rates.” For now, the PlayStation 5 Pro’s price tag remains unchanged.
Why isn’t the price of Sony’s PlayStation 5 falling?
Since its launch, Sony has not been able to decrease the cost of their latest console. This is because Sony has been unable to rely on technological advancements to make their system cheaper to produce. With prior console generations, advancements in silicon manufacturing could make consoles cheaper. Typically, a console’s CPU and GPU chips could be made using a newer, more advanced lithography node to make them smaller, cheaper, and less power-hungry. This enabled the creation of smaller “Slim” consoles that need smaller power supplies and smaller heatsinks to operate. This dropped the cost of new consoles further.
Today, cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing processes are expensive. Moving a chip to a new lithography node isn’t a guaranteed win for manufacturers. Furthermore, the price of memory and other components isn’t falling. Add on inflation and “fluctuating exchange rates”, and we have a console generation where hardware is becoming more expensive with time.
Alongside this price increase, Sony has decreased the cost of their disk drive upgrade in affected markets. This reduces the cost of the disk drive to £69.99 in the UK. Previously, the disk drive was priced at £99.99.
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