Sony Group Corp. raised the price of its PlayStation 5 console by around 25% in Europe and in the UK ahead of a likely US increase.
The company announced the decision on its PlayStation blog, with Australia and New Zealand also affected, citing inflation and “a backdrop of a challenging economic environment.” The PS5 will cost €500 in Europe and £430 in the UK from Monday.
OK, so this is weird and that headline doesn’t tell the full story.
So in Europe the only price going up is the non-Pro base PS5 Digital Edition (by 10%, not 25%).
The PS5 SKUs with a disk drive are staying the same. The PS5 Pro price is staying the same. The standalone disk drive price is actually going down.
So… WTF is happening here?
I’m guessing that the fact the US dollar is collapsing thanks to tangerine man and the Euro is quickly becoming a reserve currency and the exchange rate is going up is messing with things in strange ways? Gonna guess that some manufacturing from some regions is currently more expensive to import but maybe optical drives are still being made in the EU so they can eat some of the costs that way but Australia gets hit by both? I don’t know.
Man, what a mess. It’s the dominoes meme but with the US having a shit public education system on one end and Australian PS5s getting more expensive in the other.
What SKU still has a disk drive? I thought both the slim and pro were optical disk-less?
Just quoting the source blog. I’m guessing the phat non-digital SKU is either still in production or still in stock.