Bad news for PS6 fans as early price estimates near £1,000
It’s looking like the hobby of gaming is about to get even more expensive as early price estimates for the PlayStation 6 are looking close to £1,000 here in the UK.
That’s according to a source that claims the raw cost of materials for Sony to build the PS6 is set to be around the $960 mark. This is up $200 from the source’s report two months ago, which claimed the BOM (bill of materials) was looking at around $760.
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User KeplerL2 on NeoGaf has a reputation for demonstrating excellent industry inside knowledge. They claim that despite the ongoing crisis in consumer electronics, Sony is still aiming for a 2027 launch date.
When asked about their previous statement in March, KeplerL2 simply said: “BOM went up by ~$200 since I made that post.” Things certainly aren’t looking good for the price of the PS6.
In UK money, that puts the raw material cost of the PlayStation 6 at around £725. That’s not a million miles off what Sony is selling the PS5 Pro for right now, but there’s a bit of a catch – Sony likely won’t be selling consoles at a loss for much longer.
Normally, Xbox and Sony take a loss on their console sales with an aim to make that money back on sales of games and online services. However, given the current climate with fewer gamers able to afford the console in the first place, it seems likely that Sony will look to claw back as much production cost as they can with its next hardware launch.
Given that the PlayStation 6 will very likely be more expensive than a PS5 Pro, we can likely expect the PS6 to land north of the £789.99 the Pro is currently priced at. That takes us dangerously close to breaking the £1,000 barrier here in the UK.
We’ve seen a series of price hikes in recent months with Sony’s current slate of PlayStations getting bumped up earlier in the year. Nintendo’s Switch 2 is going up by about $50 in September, and Xbox just announced a price hike to the Series X and S consoles last week.
Valve’s own Steam Machine has been hit too with it landing at an eye-watering £879 – and that’s without a controller. The manufacturer has lamented that it’s more expensive than it would like with it initially aiming for the device to be around 30% cheaper.
With increasing use of AI globally, additional data centres are required to meet the demand. Those datacentres require computing hardware, which is often the very same that we need to put into consoles and other consumer electronics.
As the demand is so high, manufacturing plants have quickly reached their maximum capacity with stock allocations of RAM and other related components mostly booked up until the end of 2027. That’s caused a huge price surge, which is why we’re seeing such massive spikes in the price of our PCs and consoles.
The good news is that additional manufacturing plants are in the works. The bad news is that they likely won’t be up and running for a while with demands not set to be met until 2028 at the earliest.
Even then, the price of these components are unlikely to return to their original value – especially since they’ll still be in such high demand.
Unfortunately, this means that the price of consoles is only set to get more expensive for the foreseeable future. So, if you’re thinking about picking one up for GTA 6, now is most certainly going to be the cheapest time to do it.