Sony Is Reportedly “Struggling” With the PlayStation 5 Price

Here’s some bad news for the bank balances of gamers around the globe: reports suggest that expensive components are making it hard for Sony to drive drown the price of the PlayStation 5. The next-generation console is meant to be launching in the holiday season at the end of 2020, at a similar time to Microsoft’s Xbox Series X, but we’ve yet to see a confirmation of price from either company.

A report from Bloomberg, citing “people with knowledge of the matter” as its source, summarises the situation like so: apparently, “Scarce components have pushed the manufacturing costs for Sony Corp.’s next PlayStation to around $450 per unit, forcing a difficult price-setting decision in its battle with Microsoft Corp.”

This echoes a rumor that you might have heard on the web in recent weeks: the suggestion is that Sony and Microsoft are both waiting for the other to reveal the price of their next-gen console. If there’s truth to this report, it’ll be interesting to see who does blink first and put a number on the table. 

Considering that the PS5’s manufacturing cost is said to be $450 per unit, Bloomsberg predicts that “the PlayStation 5’s retail price would have to be at least $470” unless Sony finds a way to make it cheaper between now and launch.

This is, of course, a lot of money to ask people to put down. To put that price in context: the PS4 launched with a price of $399 and the PS4 Pro is currently retailing for $399.99, so the PS5 could theoretically launch into a market as the most expensive console that PlayStation fans have to choose from.

Where is this money going? Well, the PS5 rumored to have improved storage, ray-tracing capabilities, and the visual power to push out 8K visuals – so it really shouldn’t come as a big surprise that this cutting-edge piece of hardware is going to be more expensive to produce than the PS4. And if it’s true that the PS5 will have “incredibly powerful” backwards-compatibity with the previous generations of PlayStation content, you wouldn’t expect that feature to come cheap either.

The price of innovation, it seems, is pretty steep. But we’re still holding out hope that Sony will find a way to make that price seem a little less terrifying. Otherwise, there could be a lot of us geeks signing up for lengthy payment plans. Either way, once the PS5 price is confirmed, we’ll be sure to let you know.