According to a new report, the PlayStation 5 could cost Sony Interactive Entertainment around $450 per unit, suggesting the consumer console will be $500 when it hits this holiday season, unless PlayStation wants to eat manufacturing costs up front and position the next-gen piece of hardware somewhere between $400-450, which is certainly possible. The report comes way of Bloomberg, which notes that scarce components have increased the costs of creating the console to the aforementioned price point, which has forced Sony into a difficult situation as it looks to compete with the Xbox Series X on this front.
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The Takashi Mochizuki report notes that — typically — Sony likes to finalize what the price of the console will be internally by February ahead of mass production in the spring. However, for now, the company is taking a “wait-and-see approach,” presumably meaning it’s waiting to see how component scarcity changes in the coming months and how much the Xbox Series X costs.
As for the scarce components themselves, apparently Sony is having trouble getting a supply of DRAM and NAND flash memory, as both are currently in high demand by smartphone makers.
As you may know, the PS4 hit back in 2013 at a very wallet-friendly price point of $400. And given that the console was estimated to cost $381 to manufacture, this was not only a low price point, but one Sony nearly made money on at launch (retailer margin and additional costs made it more than $400 at first). However, if the PS5 is looking to replicate this gross margin, it will need to around $500, which Macquarie Capital analyst Damian Thong thinks is a bad idea.
“Consumers will benchmark their expectations based on the PS4 Pro and PS4,” said Thong “If Sony prices above that, it would likely be to balance a need to offset higher materials cost, against risk to demand.”
Of course, all of this information, and the speculation on top of it, should be taken with a grain of salt, like any report. At the moment, Sony hasn’t commented on the report, and it likely won’t. The PlayStation makers rarely comment on rumors.
The PlayStation 5 is poised to release sometime this holiday season. For more news, media, rumors, and leaks on the PS5, be sure to take a second and peruse all of our past and recent coverage of the console by clicking right here.
