The PS5 Pro at $900. Marinate on that for a moment or three.
Sony confirmed last Thursday that new prices for the entire PS5 hardware lineup take effect on April 2, meaning if you wanted the old price, the window essentially closed yesterday. The standard PS5 goes from $549.99 to $649.99, the Digital Edition from $499.99 to $599.99, the PS5 Pro from $749.99 to $899.99, and the PlayStation Portal from $199.99 to $249.99. This follows a previous round of increases in August 2025, which means the standard PS5 has gone up $150 in the past year and the Pro has gone up $200. The company cites “continued pressures in the global economic landscape,” which in plain terms means AI demand has vacuumed up the DRAM supply that would normally go into consumer electronics like game consoles.
Analyst Piers Harding-Rolls from Ampere Analysis told CNBC the increases were inevitable. His read is that Sony had been operating under fixed component pricing agreements that have now expired, leaving them exposed to market-rate memory costs. Memory represents a major line item in PS5 BOM, and DRAM prices have risen sharply across 2025 and into 2026.
From a PC gaming perspective, this isn’t just a console story. It’s one more data point in the ongoing picture of gaming hardware becoming significantly more expensive across all platforms in 2026. The PS5 Pro at $900 is now directly price-competitive with a solid mid-range gaming PC, which is a strange place for a mid-generation console refresh to land. Sony has historically benefited from being the “affordable” entry point into high-performance gaming relative to PC building costs; that edge is narrowing fast.
There’s also a reported downstream effect: Bloomberg cited sources suggesting Sony is considering delaying the PlayStation 6 into 2028 or 2029 due to the same component cost pressures. If that plays out, it would extend the PS5’s run significantly and put more pressure on Sony to deliver software value on the current hardware.
For PC enthusiasts watching from the sidelines, the standard advice applies: if you need a PS5 for exclusives, stock existed at the old price until yesterday. The new pricing is the new reality. If you’re purely gaming on PC, this doesn’t affect you directly, but the same memory shortage driving PS5’s price hike is the same one affecting DDR5 kits, high-VRAM GPU availability, and SSD pricing.