Sony may not have shown up for Gamescom this year, but the company still managed to dominate headlines from the show – although it might have preferred not to.
The announcement that the PS5’s price will be increasing in most global markets was pushed out as a post on the PlayStation blog earlier this week; Sony may have been hoping that news from Gamescom would soften the impact a little, compared with dropping this kind of news in one of the summer’s more empty weeks. I’m not sure it worked; there’s not much anyone wants to talk about this week other than price hikes.
So let’s talk about price hikes – not just Sony’s price hike, but the broader question of the upward pressures on the industry’s pricing, which has been brought into pretty sharp focus by Sony’s decision. There’s plenty of upset going around in consumer circles about the PS5 price increase, along with some gallows humour about how it barely makes a difference to those consumers who can’t find a PS5 to buy in the first place – but this isn’t the first price rise we’ve seen in recent months, and it’s highly unlikely to be the last.