Sony just made it official: the PS5 is getting another price hike, and it’s wild. The disc PS5 is now $650, the Digital Edition (the “affordable” one) is $600, and the PS5 Pro jumped from $700 to $900. That’s a 50% increase on a five-and-a-half-year-old console—aka the exact opposite of how console generations have worked for decades. I pulled together the data (yes, I made a Keynote) and the pattern is clear: across Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, this is the first generation where prices are going up instead of down. The bigger story is why gaming is getting so expensive, and it’s not just “greed” (even if that’s part of it). We’re getting squeezed from both sides: the RAM crisis (AI data centers eating the memory supply) is driving component shortages, and consoles are also getting hit hard by tariffs. At the same time, AAA game budgets are exploding into the $200–$300M range, layoffs keep happening, and mobile gaming is a free-to-play ad-filled mess if you’re priced out of consoles. The part that worries me most isn’t the hike itself—it’s what happens after the RAM crisis ends. If companies learn people will still buy $600+ consoles, there’s a real chance prices don’t come back down.