Sony reportedly battling to keep PlayStation 5 price down

Sony is struggling to land on a price for its upcoming PlayStation 5 console, according to a new report by Bloomberg, with component shortages potentially pushing the MSRP beyond that of the PS4. The bill of materials is said to be at around $450 right now, compared to IHS Markit’s estimate of $381 for the PS4, which sold for $399 upon its release in 2013. Unless Sony is willing to sell the PS5 at a loss, a $450 build cost would make the new console significantly more expensive than Sony’s current $399 PS4 Pro, which is often discounted to as low as $299. It was once common for consoles to be sold as loss leaders, but Sony designed the PS4 to be profitable from the start after losing billions on the technically ambitious PS3 at launch.

Sony has already confirmed that the PS5 will be built around solid-state flash storage, which is notoriously expensive and susceptible to supply-chain fluctuations. The amount of storage the company is planning to include on the PS5 will have a major impact on the price of the overall device. Couple that with a next-generation AMD GPU with hardware support for ray tracing and presumably a lot of RAM, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see the PS5 come in at a higher launch price than its predecessor. The Bloomberg report also says that Sony is working on a new PlayStation VR virtual reality headset, which is said to be planned for release after the PS5.