If you’ve been following gaming news lately, you already know it hasn’t been a great few weeks. In this video I zoom in on the PS5 price hike—not because I think “Sony bad” is an interesting endpoint, but because if you trace the cause upstream, it turns into a much bigger story. Yes, the anger at Sony is justified. But Sony is downstream of forces they didn’t start and can’t stop, and if we don’t understand that, we’ll keep burning energy on the wrong target while prices keep climbing. I break the situation into layers. First: memory. The global supply of memory chips effectively runs through Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, and right now AI infrastructure is eating capacity because a module sold into a data center pays dramatically better than one sold into a console. Second: the Middle East conflict disrupting physically irreplaceable inputs—helium (critical for semiconductor manufacturing) taking a hit after Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility was struck, plus broader market shock rippling into South Korea where two of the top suppliers sit. Third: materials like bromine, sourced heavily from regions directly involved in the conflict. The takeaway is the part that feels dystopian: gaming is the most profitable entertainment sector in history, and it’s still being squeezed by geopolitics and an AI arms race that doesn’t care gaming exists. The cost cascades downward, and as always, it lands on the people at the bottom who just wanted to play games.