Thinking of buying a PS5? Beware this quiet downgrade

This is turning out to be quite the challenging year for gaming – with the inflation that ran rampant through 2024 and 2025 now starting to bite in terms of pricing in many areas. While we haven't seen wholesale price rises from every console maker, there have been no price cuts to speak of, and Sony just underlined how that arithmetic might be working.

After confirming the news a few weeks ago, it has now started to roll out a new version of the slim PlayStation 5, which cuts down its internal storage by a meaningful amount. When the PS5 first launched, it came with an 825GB internal SSD for game storage, but when the slim model arrived, it upped this to 1TB.

That was a welcome change in an era of huge download sizes for games, but it seems like price hikes in components have made Sony reverse course. As of now, all new PS5 Slim models will go back down to 825GB for their internal SSD, although their pricing won't be changed to reflect the change.

For anyone buying a console, therefore, whether they're going for a used model or a new one on the store shelf, there's now an extra bit of research to do. You can quite easily work out whether the console you're buying will have 825GB or 1TB of storage, since the packaging will confirm things either way.

The used market is where this should be particularly impactful, since you'd probably want to pay less for a console that's identical in every way apart from having less storage for your downloaded games.

Needless to say, Sony hasn't been going out of its way to acknowledge this whole situation, or to shine a spotlight on the change for its customers. So, the more you know, the more you can contort things to avoid getting less SSD space for your money if you're about to buy a new console. If you've got a bigger budget, have no fear – the PS5 Pro is unaffected by all of this.