They used to, but this generation has been hit by at least 4 independant crises that have made them more expensive over time:
1. Moore's law dying means that older nodes are still very useful, so there's still lots of people bidding for capacity on these 8 or whatever year old foundry nodes who are willing to pay lots of money, meaning that base costs of the CPU and GPU haven't fallen as quickly as one would expect even in the absence of 2-4.
2. The Pandemic and then Russia's invasion of Ukraine screwed with supply chains quite a bit, and caused an inflationary spike.
3. Trump's tariffs affected the profitability of these consoles, and inserted a lot of uncertainty into them because nobody knows how the tariffs situation will evolve over time, or if Sony will get reimbursed or not for the illegal tariffs that were levied against them. The uncertainty and general animosity towards the USA has also caused the US Dollar to slump in value relative to a lot of currencies, which then pressures Sony to raise prices.
4. The current RAM, SSD, and GPU shortages caused by LLM hyperscalers is again spiking the costs of their components
I'm surprised it took them this long. They must have had an extremely large stockpile of PS5s, or just a large willingness to lose margings when they refused to raise prices in the USA (but raised them outside of the USA!) in response to the tariffs, and then even held steady when RAM prices went crazy.
My guess is that this is because the USA was the last holdout region for the Xbox having any degree of market penetration, so they kept prices there low in order to totally kill the Xbox, and have now decided that it's time to start recovering those lost margins.
Nintendo much be in an especially hard place. They just released their new generation of consoles, but from what I hear holiday sales did "fine". Not great, fine. So they definitely don't want to stunt their entire generation by raisig their prices in the first year while they are already worried about hardware sales. Maybe that's a part of why they recently reported the price differences between physical and digital games.
Don't console prices typically go down over the lifetime of a console? For example, the PS4 launched at $399 on 2013. By 2015 it was $350 or lower.
They used to, but this generation has been hit by at least 4 independant crises that have made them more expensive over time:
1. Moore's law dying means that older nodes are still very useful, so there's still lots of people bidding for capacity on these 8 or whatever year old foundry nodes who are willing to pay lots of money, meaning that base costs of the CPU and GPU haven't fallen as quickly as one would expect even in the absence of 2-4.
2. The Pandemic and then Russia's invasion of Ukraine screwed with supply chains quite a bit, and caused an inflationary spike.
3. Trump's tariffs affected the profitability of these consoles, and inserted a lot of uncertainty into them because nobody knows how the tariffs situation will evolve over time, or if Sony will get reimbursed or not for the illegal tariffs that were levied against them. The uncertainty and general animosity towards the USA has also caused the US Dollar to slump in value relative to a lot of currencies, which then pressures Sony to raise prices.
4. The current RAM, SSD, and GPU shortages caused by LLM hyperscalers is again spiking the costs of their components
That's because in the past there were HUGE fabrication improvements that made chips and memory cheaper.
I recall that the PS1 memory cards used flash memory that was just invented in 1994.
Yes, but with RAM prices basically tripling + SSD prices doubling + continued tariffs, the prices can only go up currently.
Significant pain is coming as fallout from the Iran war as well.
The price of raw plastic from our plastic mold houses has tripled recently as there's a shortage of raw input....
Right? This is hilarious - sony is now selling old consoles for more money?? Come on!
Appreciating assets!
I'm surprised it took them this long. They must have had an extremely large stockpile of PS5s, or just a large willingness to lose margings when they refused to raise prices in the USA (but raised them outside of the USA!) in response to the tariffs, and then even held steady when RAM prices went crazy.
My guess is that this is because the USA was the last holdout region for the Xbox having any degree of market penetration, so they kept prices there low in order to totally kill the Xbox, and have now decided that it's time to start recovering those lost margins.
You're right that the US was holding out while other regions got price increeases. But this is actually the 2nd US price increase in 12 months. This is the increase from August: https://blog.playstation.com/2025/08/20/playstation-5-price-...
Nintendo much be in an especially hard place. They just released their new generation of consoles, but from what I hear holiday sales did "fine". Not great, fine. So they definitely don't want to stunt their entire generation by raisig their prices in the first year while they are already worried about hardware sales. Maybe that's a part of why they recently reported the price differences between physical and digital games.