This week, PlayStation raised the price of short-term PlayStation Plus Essential plans in select regions. Same service, slightly less friendly price.
This comes off the back of their relatively-recent announcement that the PS5 Consoles would also be increasing in price in 2026:
| Region | PS5 | PS5 Digital Edition | PS5 Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| U.S. | $549.99 → $649.99 | $499.99 → $599.99 | $749.99 → $899.99 |
| U.K. | £479.99 → £569.99 | £429.99 → £519.99 | £699.99 → £789.99 |
| Europe | €549.99 → €649.99 | €499.99 → €599.99 | €799.99 → €899.99 |
| Japan | ¥79,980 → ¥97,980 | ¥72,980 → ¥89,980 | ¥119,980 → ¥137,980 |
So for me in the UK, the lowest “normal” PS5-and-online-play starting point is now about £630: £569.99 for the console and £59.99 for a year of PlayStation Plus Essential.
Or, if you pay monthly, that online access becomes about £95.88 a year, which pushes the starting point to roughly £666.
That is before you:
- Buy a game
- Buy a second controller
- Buy extra storage
- Buy a headset
- Realise the game your friends are playing has its own battle pass
- …Want to get the Deluxe Edition, because it has the stuff you actually want in it
I hate to sound like a grandad, but in my PlayStation days you got the box, a controller, and a demo disc. Then you picked up more demo discs from magazines and bought games from actual shops, where prices could drop, stock could clear, and second-hand copies existed….
… then you played. That was it.
Now, in the age of digital gaming, more of the experience lives online and inside closed storefronts. The store sets the price. Refunds are limited. Discounted codes are rarer. Trade-ins don’t exist to recoup some of the cost.
..and once everything is tied to an account, you are not really building a shelf of games in the old sense. You are building a “permission” library.
PlayStation is not the only company doing this either. Nintendo has also announced price increases for the Switch 2 in some regions, along with Switch Online changes in Japan, and Xbox has had its own Game Pass pricing drama recently.
So even before we talk about rising game prices themselves, the basic cost of getting into gaming is shifting upwards.
This all comes while PC gaming has its own affordability problem, with high component prices and GPU demand increasingly tangled up with the AI boom, and some parts of the industry just stopping working for the gamer.
So what do we do about it?
The slightly positive bit is that players are not completely powerless here. The Xbox drop showed that backlash can still matter. When a price rise lands badly enough, companies do notice. They may not reverse everything, and they may wrap any climbdown in careful wording, but they still notice.
We can also:
- Complain
- Skip the Deluxe Edition
- Wait for sales
- Buy pre-owned where possible
- Cancel subscriptions
- Skip the battle passes
- Hold off on those pre-orders
None of this will fix gaming overnight, but it sends a message, and if enough people stop paying for the bits they do not actually want, that message becomes harder to ignore.
Gaming did not become a luxury overnight. It happened one small extra cost at a time, gradually pulling more money from the pockets of the average player.
But the average player still gets a choice. They can decide what is worth paying for, what is worth waiting for, and what is worth ignoring completely.
As dull as the phrase is, sometimes the only thing left to do is vote with your wallet.
What do you think?