There's One Positive for Physical Fans Amid PS5's Price Increase Chaos

I said when the PS5 Pro was announced that it was looking likely that any next gen console may be moving into pricing territory of being prohibitively expensive for many.

Here we are with the PS5 receiving its second price increase since launch and now £70 more expensive than back then.

Despite all the fuss over Switch 2 recently, this was never just a Nintendo problem but an industry problem

My country didn’t get the memo about this, so the price is still over 120€ like it has been, so might as well buy the normal PS5 (which is now 599€ here) if you think about buying even one physical game.

With Game Keys becoming the new stamdard model for third party releases on NS2, will PlayStation become the last fortress for real physical games? What an irony!

@Max_the_German like Indiana Jones 😂

@carlos82 THAT is something probably nobody will understand.

Similar to what I said on the other article, this may be a form of reset by Sony, at least based on UK / EU prices.

The Disc console and Pro staying the same price, but the Digital going up and drives down, is very suggestive that they were slightly subsidising or taking less profit on digital consoles, in order to push All Digital (and charging higher on the separate drives accordingly).

But something has changed - maybe because the higher drive prices were off-putting to Pro customers (pure guesswork).
Now they have simply increased the Digital console Price, and decreased the drive prices, by similar (but not the same) amounts to better reflect manufacturing cost.

Looking at the positives, this is effectively a price drop for the PS5 Pro with Disc Drive

@carlos82
RE console prices.
I completely agree with you - this tech is just not getting cheaper like it used to, and even if PS6 launches when expected it will probably be £600 Digital.

(Just look at the Price of a half decent PC if you build from scratch without using second hand parts or parts they "just had lying around" like some do if they are trying to prove how cheap it is!)

My hope is that Sony launch PS6 at a time to get a decent power to cost ratio (possibly 2028).
I also hope a particularly enhanced across the board Pro (approx £1000) is launched at the same time - no need to bother then with upgrading half way though the generation.

A price increase doesn't make a PS5pro more affordable. It makes the PS5 less affordable 🤷‍♀️

@ChrisDeku hopefully they'll actually keep a decent level of stock of it. Although looking at the Playstation direct site, it seems the PS5 digital has gone up in price but the drive hasn't actually gone down yet

So overall a PS5 Pro with Disc Drive is £40 less. (If you really want to spin a positive).

And I wouldn’t buy the Pro without the disc drive as I’m predominantly a physical gamer.

The problem is I can’t justify the price of the Pro console. Even though I really do want to see Tifa and Aerith in 4K 60fps…

It's a weird day when physical media isn't screwed over and digital media is.

Just had a feeling things weren't going to change that much, prices were either going to get worse, stay the same or reduce insignificantly. So I stopped waiting and got me the disc-PS5 fresh off the boat, I barely use the drive even, since most of my games are digital.

So this will make the supply and demand issue even worse, unless Sony are going to increase production hugely!

Hopefully there are few scalpers who bought dozens at £99 and are still sat on their stock...

@Rich33 PC prices (at least in Oz) are going through the roof...and I'm not even talking about 50-series rigs...All of them. My son bought his rig for about AUD2.5k (2+ years ago)... an equivalent rig is now moving up to AUD3.5 - 4k... for a 4070 (mid) style equivalent build.

I am fully expecting the PS6 to retail at USD1000 (or not far from it). To be honest, I think gaming is pricing itself out of existence... despite the dedicated consumers, I just don't see the bulk market paying the likely prices coming down the pike. And once consoles and gaming rigs become purely the domain of the hyper-enthusiast, then the industry is dead.

We're not there yet - but 2028 is a long way away, and the effect of price hikes is hard to walk back (commercially). Politically less so.

Timing it for the inevitable GTA6 sales ?

I guess the disc drives are selling well enough to help with economies of scale.

Also kinda off topic but does anyone know if Sony fixed the PS3 clock battery DRM issue like they did with the PS4?

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare
Im not sure about USD1000 - although with these insane tarriffs im not ruling anything out and am still relatively fearful of where that may end up. But as you say, they will price themselves out of the market. Before Mr Orange got involved, I was expecting £600 Digital only - so about USD700 (though my currency conversion is not to be relied upon!) .

I think Pro's price is fully indicative of how expensive this tech is becoming - although smartphone and PC prices are all similarly good indicators. I used PC because I looked into very rough pricing of a rig from scratch about a year ago, before Pro was leaked.

The problem Sony have is the whole balancing act of Price / Power / Release date - I mean if the PS6 launches in 2026/2027 as some have said (I personally think this is unlikely), will it even be realistically more powerful than PS5 Pro?
If I was Sony, unless they have a giant rabbit hidden up a sleeve, and with a (if you believe the hype from Cerny) massive boost to PSSR coming in just under a year, I would focus on getting PS5 and Pros price down and extending this generation to 2028 or later.
But then, I also would let people know this, to reduce the 'I'll wait for PS6' behaviour.

I will say as an aside, that I always favour performance over more complex graphics. Maybe Switch 2's low capability might reign in devs 'ambitions' a bit more in terms of complex graphics, and we will see less games that are clearly targeted at higher spec PCs. Maybe.

@Rich33 The USD1000 is statement of dread - admittedly not a real prediction. However, I think we can all see the writing on the wall... things are getting more expensive; without a clear justification. Companies will keep companying... and if they can, they will. The problem (as I see it) is that by linking consoles increasingly with PC's, their prices are also linked. The Sony sales spiel is even now being linked with PCs (even today we're being told that the PS5Pro is equivalent to high end PCs...). Perhaps the thought is to show a value proposition (how cheap it is); whereas I feel the natural commercial response is to price up against your next nearest competitor.

Add tariffs and the complete up-ending of the multinational trade system, and I think there's little advantage in keeping prices capped in the same way. And if I'm being honest, I don't think it's sustainable to try and imagine the previous console prices (even if the US drops the ridiculous 145% tariff on China - the belief that this level of tariff should shape prices will remain in the market psychology).

The genie is now out of the bottle.

Edit - and yes, I'm 100% for performance mode over quality mode. Even if it's only 60FPS, I will play that anyday over 30FPS (even on something like BG3 which is not an action game). I just find it more natural to interact with the game/UI, and infinitely less grating. I can't remember any game where I thought the 'graphical' enhancements overrode the the fluidity of the game. Not sure if that's what you meant.

Edit^2: there is zero chance that PS6 will release in 2026 (27)... if it does, that's an indicator for the console End of Days.

Seems hardware and software were always going to increase if they had their way about it.

https://n4g.com/news/2662129/ex-playstation-ceo-says-companies-should-have-baked-in-5-price-hike-every-gen-to-acclimate-gamers

@themightyant there is on Sonys own website but despite raising the price of the digital PS5 at the same time as this announcement, they are yet to reduce the price of the disc drive there

Why is it "chaos"?

Psdirect still saying disk drive is 99 quid.

Finally an incentive to buy the Pro...

I still think a separately sold drive is potentially a good thing for people. Disc drives tend to be the first thing to break down on a console, a cheap replacement would've saved me a lot on money on consoles in the past.
Obviously this strongly depends on them staying available and affordable though.

@Ultimapunch As long as we don't have as many Halo Infinite, Spyro Reignited, Jedi Survivor, Indy disk situations or others that don't care. Or COD MW3 levels of barely caring if the few MB is true. I think those are the notable or ones I've heard or come across at least that did.

PS3 clock I don't remember. I forget what happened with that after a time, PS4 was talked about, don't think the most recent PS3 update solved that either, or the last one a while ago. Maybe they did, not heard much on them about them being related I'd have to look into it if people have talked about it as such or just it may be old forum posts and no conclusion.

I haven't done it myself as I refuse to remove the Vita support and I don't use PS3 online services much anyway. I'll have one for Vita and one for PS store eventually but mostly been using Vita store if have to not the PS3 store.

Hah! 70 notes is still about £65 more than it costs to make it. Of course, now that the rush to acquire one is over it doesn't help me. Although all those scalpers that thought they was gonna make a pretty penny have my deepest sympathies.