Sony has raised the prices of their PlayStation controllers in the US.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, the price changes were noticed by Wario64. Across Best Buy, Target, and GameStop, DualSense controllers went up from $ 70 to $ 75.
But that’s not all. The price change was also made on Sony’s own PlayStation Direct Store. That pretty much clinches that these price changes are real, and they are not likely to be a temporary change.
As Video Games Chronicle also noted, Sony has been raising prices for PlayStation in America for some time now. Last year, Sony launched new smaller models of the PlayStation 5. Ostensibly, these new models should be cheaper to make than the older ones, and Sony could price them differently.
Instead, the disc version of the smaller PlayStation 5 is priced the same, and the smaller PlayStation 5 without a disc drive has ended up costing $ 50 more than the original, larger, PlayStation 5 without a disc drive.
We reported on the lack of enthusiasm gamers had for these announcements. That seemed to reflect on consumer behavior as well, as analytics firm Ampere found out a few months ago that half of all Grand Theft Auto V players were still on PlayStation 4.
Things are even worse in Sony’s home country of Japan, where PlayStation products recently went through its third price hike in this console generation. Those price changes are far steeper, and come from the serious issues in Japan’s domestic economy.
As we know from Sony’s own data, they have shipped 117.2 million units of the PlayStation 4 as of March 31, 2022, and then shipped 61.8 million units of the PlayStation 5 as of June 30, 2024. There are also 116 million monthly active users on PSN as of June 30, 2024.
This means there is still a considerable number of PlayStation gamers who haven’t upgraded from PlayStation 4 to PlayStation 5, and Sony is currently working on getting them to upgrade, and stay in the ecosystem of course. While it isn’t likely for the average PlayStation gamer to switch ecosystems to Xbox, it’s also still more likely for them to keep their PlayStation 4s than to upgrade to a PlayStation 5.
There are of course, economic issues at play here. Americans really don’t experience them as harshly as other countries do, but it has come for them too. But clearly, a big problem that Sony created themselves, is that they had promised the prospect of games standardizing 4K 60 FPS, only for most developers to choose to avoid those standards. Instead they have chosen to prioritize graphics and performance, particularly ray tracing.
Since most PlayStation 5 games do not live up to that promise, PlayStation 4 gamers can feel justified in not upgrading. It certainly feels like there’s a significant group of gamers willing to sit out the rest of this console generation. If the next generation of PlayStation and Xbox consoles can deliver on 4K 60FPS, maybe they will skip the current generation completely.
Unfortunately, we know all too well that these consumer behaviors have a serious effect on the games business, serious enough that we are in the second year of a wave of industry layoffs. Paradoxically, this situation may be forcing Sony’s hand to increase prices, to get more money from those gamers loyal enough to keep buying new products from them right now.
You cannot scold gamers into buying new consoles, even if some fanboys feel like they can. The game companies have to come up with something new to get interest into the current consoles back. But perhaps what we are seeing is the likes of Sony and Microsoft licking their wounds and biding their time. Maybe the truth is they can’t do all that much about this situation until those next generation consoles after the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S are finally ready.
