Very little is known about Sony’s next-generation PlayStation system, which will presumably be called the PS5. We do know, however, that it will be capable of an impressive 8K resolution with ray tracing, and that power doesn’t come cheaply. That being said, we sure are hoping the price on a recent product listing is just a placeholder.
The Swedish retailer MediaMarkt has posted a listing for the PlayStation 5, offering it up for pre-order. The description includes previously revealed details, such as ray tracing, SSD storage, and backwards compatibility. The retailer did not include a potential release date, but it did, however, offer a price: 9999 SEK, which translates to just under $1050. The online retailer also allows you to pre-order the console at the amount listed, but we strongly discourage ordering the PS5 through this site.
We can almost guarantee that this price is simply a placeholder while we wait for the final price announcement from Sony, and the language elsewhere on the page suggests MediaMarkt knows just as little about the PS5 as we do. However, game consoles have cost this much in the past. When adjusted for inflation, the Neo-Geo system released in 1991 would have been more than $1,110 at launch, as would the 3DO released two years later.
We haven’t seen game consoles come close to this figure since then, with Sony’s own PlayStation 3 being the most recent example of an “expensive system” when it launched with $500 and $600 configurations. Given that the PS4 launched at $400 back in 2013, we expect the PS5 to be priced similarly, if not more. Analysts have suggested it could potentially start out at $500 and one of our own editors that estimated the cost to manufacture the PS5’s hardware agrees, but the total listed on the Swedish retail site is far too high for the average player to consider paying.
Sony must also keep its price in competition with Xbox’s upcoming Project Scarlett, which is set to release in late 2020. While Microsoft will not want to replicate the fiasco that was the Xbox One’s $500 price back in 2013, the hardware being offered this upcoming generation is substantially better. The Xbox One X launched with a $499 price tag not even a year ago, and Project Scarlett is anticipated to include hardware superior to it.
