It used to be that later into a console cycle you’d see sales soar when Sony or Microsoft lowered the device’s price as the internal tech became cheaper to produce. Now we see sales spikes before the prices go up. Grim times, but it certainly seems to explain why the PlayStation 5 had its best week of 2026 as April began.
In late March, Sony announced that it would be raising the price of each of its PS5 models by at least $100 the following week. The second bump in price in the last couple of years, it meant that a basic PlayStation 5, once $500, now costs $650. For comparison, as VGC points out, at the same point in the PS4’s life that console had dropped from $400 to $200. We live in truly shitty times. But it seems enough noise was made about the incoming colossal hike that people rushed out to pick up the consoles before the change.
This is according to Mat Piscatella at Circana, who says Sony saw its best week of the year between March 29 and April 4. “US weekly unit and $ sales of PlayStation 5 hardware,” he says, “reached 2026 highs during the week ending April 4th, as price increases loomed.” This represents, he claims, almost a doubling of the previous week’s sales.
Even the PS5’s digital edition has now become prohibitively expensive, with the once-bargain version of the machine that ships without a disc drive now costing an eye-watering $600. It launched at $400, meaning the tech is now 50 percent more expensive than it was five-and-a-half years ago. While we’re used to prices increasing on most items, it’s just never been the case for consoles before due to the previous norm of tech getting smaller and cheaper to manufacture. But as Sony calls it, “continued pressure in the global economic landscape” has flipped this all upside-down. This is code, of course, for Trump’s tariffs destabilizing entire economies while the gruesome AI bubble consumes all the available RAM and GPU.
Hopefully you got a PS5, especially if you were after a PS5 Pro, ahead of the price rises. As things stand now, console gaming is increasingly a domain for the wealthy.
