An AI-fueled supply crunch for memory and storage is driving up hardware prices across the gaming industry, but Sony says it has enough RAM to get it through this holiday season and into early 2027. What comes after that is anybody’s guess as the PlayStation 6 approaches amid an unprecedented economic landscape for gaming.
“Regarding the impact of memory market conditions on PlayStation 5 hardware, we have secured the quantity of memory necessary to meet our projected sales volume for FY26, and there is no change to our plan for hardware profitability for FY26 to remain similar to FY25,” Sony stated in its latest earnings report. It’s unclear if that means there won’t be another PS5 price hike in the second half of this year.
At the very least, the PS5 maker appears to be signaling there won’t be a scarcity of consoles this holiday season as players who don’t already have current-gen hardware rush to get their hands on it for the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI in November. Sony actually revised its projected revenue for the fiscal year upwards by 3 percent, and its operating income by 10 percent.
The company only sold 1.38 million new PS5s last quarter, down from 1.56 million the same time a year ago. That drop is likely lower than many expected given the price of the base PS5 went up by $100 back in March. While third-party game sales were up year-over-year, first-party sales actually dropped by 900,000 units, suggesting Saros hasn’t performed that great. Four months later, Sony still hasn’t released sales figures for Housemarque’s latest sci-fi shooter, or updated numbers for last year’s Ghost of Yotei.
The number of total PlayStation monthly active users was 125 million, up 2 million from the same time in 2025. And while Sony just announced that discs for new games are going away in 2028, the ratio of digital to physical sales actually narrowly fell by 1 percent last quarter. The total lifetime sales of PS5 console units is now 95.3 million. It continues to trail lifetime sales of the PS4 over an equivalent time period, but not by much considering the repeated price increases, first from tariffs and now from RAMageddon.
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