PS5 price rises are a threat to the gaming industry – even if it's not Sony's fault

I was in a cafe in the centre of London when I saw Sony's blog post about raising the PS5's price across all models last week. Sometimes a day off coincides with some big news, and there's just nothing you can do about it – but that didn't stop me from basically ignoring a conversation for a few minutes to read the whole post.

Sony's explanations do hold water, to a degree; its arguments about the "continued pressures" in the market, particularly in terms of the steeply rising costs of various components, including all types of memory, are fair enough and are being made by plenty of other tech giants, too.

Still, there's no way this can be spun into anything remotely resembling a positive story – it's a disaster for the console generation, and means that the PS5 will be cemented as the console era in which waiting to buy a console when it's cheaper stopped being something you could even do.

The hikes aren't even negligible from a percentage point of view, adding £90 or $100 basically across the board (ignoring the cheaper Portal as its own separate case). That's huge money, and it's striking that these are the sorts of margins that PlayStation consoles' prices used to fall by once they'd been on the market for half a decade.

It seems like those days are gone, or at least don't seem like they're coming back anytime soon, and it's not too hard to work out the broadest reason for all this happening. Whatever moniker you want to give it, from RAMageddon to the RAMpocalypse, the fact is that we're now a long way into the memory price spikes caused by AI companies driving demand for components.

Sony's not the only corporation to have raised prices on its consoles, and it must be remembered that this isn't even the first PS5 price hike it's brought in. We're years into this process, and it doesn't feel good at all.

At a time when gaming studios seem more fragile than ever, and where big games need to sell millions of copies to stand a chance of breaking even, or attract millions of players to last longer than a few weeks before being shuttered, it underlines the fact that the vibes in gaming aren't so great right now.

Some people might try to spin this as not the worst thing in the world for actual gamers, who can skate above the industry turmoil and just play the games that survive, but it all speaks to a really precipitous situation – and "industry crash" is the sort of phrase getting bandied about more and more in development circles.

Sure, titans like GTA 6 will still come and do genuinely incredible numbers every so often, but with the amount of turmoil going around, and now these price hikes, the actual ceiling of players out there feels like it may start to plateau or stagnate.

None of that worry makes it Sony's fault that the PS5's getting hiked – the blame lies more with the AI bubble and the investors pushing it. Still, it makes 2026 feel like a pretty challenging year for gaming and gamers. Needless to say, if you can buy a PS5 of any description before 2 April, I'd do that.