According to a new report, the PlayStation 5 could cost Sony Interactive Entertainment about $450 per unit. Recommending the consumer console will be $500 when it hits this holiday season. Unless PlayStation wants to eat manufacturing costs upfront and put the next-gen piece of hardware somewhere within $400-450, which is certainly conceivable. The report comes the way of Bloomberg. It records that scarce components have increased the prices of creating the console to the aforementioned price point, which has pushed Sony into a difficult position as it looks to fight with the Xbox Series X on this front.
The Takashi Mochizuki report writes that — typically — Sony likes to finalize what the price of the console will be internally by February ahead of mass production in the spring. Nevertheless, for now, the company is taking a “wait-and-see approach,” probably meaning it’s waiting to see how component scarcity developments in the coming months and how much the Xbox Series X costs.
As for the scarce components themselves, apparently, Sony is having difficulty getting a supply of DRAM and NAND flash memory, as both are currently in high demand by smartphone producers.
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 expected to cost $381 to manufacture. This was not only a low price point, but one Sony nearly made money on at launch. However, if the Playstation 5 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 the risk to demand.”
Of course, all of this information, and the speculation on top of it, should be taken with a grain of salt, as any report. At the moment, Sony hasn’t commented on the report, and it likely won’t. The PlayStation 5 makers rarely comment on rumors.
