In one of this year’s best jokes, Sony is hosting a nice little Black Friday discount deal, offering many peripherals and hardware at a lower price to mark the year’s biggest sales day. However, the actual console, i.e. the most expensive piece of hardware Sony has to offer, remains out of reach.
As Polygon spotted, Sony is discounting a lot of its hardware for this year’s Black Friday, offering items such as the DualSense controller at $20 off, taking off a $100 chunk out of the PSVR2 headset, and even selling a full-blown 27-inch monitor with a PS charging hook for $50 less. Great stuff, but there’s one issue: most of this is hardware meant to be used with a PlayStation 5, which, surprise surprise, isn’t discounted at all.
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This follows a myriad of price hikes to the console which drove up its price by hundreds in certain markets, making it a luxury item rather than an affordable venue for gamers who are unwilling to shill out the extra dough for a price-gouged PC in our AI-infested world. While many of the items above are usable with a PC, which players would have to pay a lot more for, the PlayStation 5 is the main reason they’d be getting it, making this Black Friday deal rather superficial with the primary item still at full price.
I couldn’t find a listing for a new PlayStation 5 on Amazon, but used ones are running between $748 and $798 depending on if it’s the disc or digital version (this former becoming near-obsolete starting in 2028). On Best Buy, a 1TB slim version is $649, or $599 if you don’t want the disc drive, though these prices are before tax.
With Sony opting to maintain this price rather than to make the console just a tad cheaper for the holiday season, I don’t see how the company means to improve its ever-diminishing monthly console sales. If this continues, we could be looking at a $1000+ PS6, though the PS5 Pro, if you can find one, is already around that mark.
