An unprecedented regime of tariffs was implemented by President Trump in 2025. Every console maker raised its prices in the months that followed. Now those same companies are getting massive refunds from the government after the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs as unconstitutional, and gamers are suing for a chunk of the money. As Game File reports, this has put companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony in the awkward position of telling their customers to take a hike.
In legal terms, that sentiment sounds like what Microsoft and Sony’s lawyers wrote in recent filings knocking down claims that they owe their customers refunds. In the PlayStation 5 manufacturer’s case, it was $508 million back from Uncle Sam. That is more than double what Sony paid to acquire Insomniac Games, the studio behind Marvel’s Wolverine.
“Paying fair market price for voluntarily purchased consumer goods is not a legally cognizable injury in fact,” the companies lawyers wrote to California’s Northern District Court in a request to have the class action lawsuit dismissed, per Game File. Sony went on to claim that that if tariffs were the cause of recent PS5 and PlayStation Portal price hikes, they wouldn’t have raised prices again after the tariffs were declared unconstitutional.
“If tariffs were the cause of the price increases, one would expect SIE to lower prices once the tariffs were eliminated—not raise them again,” its lawyers argued. “Instead, the timeline confirms that the pricing of PlayStation consoles includes a diverse and dynamic set of input costs.”
Microsoft is ceding no ground in its own defense against a similar class action lawsuit, either. “There is nothing unjust about Plaintiff purchasing an Xbox at an advertised price and getting exactly what he paid for—regardless of whatever theory he devised months later about Microsoft’s cost structure,” its legal representatives argued. Their defense was, essentially, “prove it.”
“Plaintiff provides no specific allegations that would establish any pricing differential attributable to tariffs or suggest any possibility that Microsoft applied then or could recreate now any dollar-for-dollar calculation of tariff-related pricing—any more than it could any other market factor that affects pricing,” the filing read.
Nintendo made similar points in its own attempt to get the class action lawsuit its facing thrown out. And they all might be right on the legal merits. I’m not a lawyer and this is a somewhat unprecedented situation brought on by one of the dumbest and most chaotic executive branches in the history of the country. But the arguments seem unlikely to be as persuasive in the court of public opinion.
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