I'm surprised it took them this long. They must have had an extremely large stockpile of PS5s, or just a large willingness to lose margings when they refused to raise prices in the USA (but raised them outside of the USA!) in response to the tariffs, and then even held steady when RAM prices went crazy.

My guess is that this is because the USA was the last holdout region for the Xbox having any degree of market penetration, so they kept prices there low in order to totally kill the Xbox, and have now decided that it's time to start recovering those lost margins.

You're right that the US was holding out while other regions got price increeases. But this is actually the 2nd US price increase in 12 months. This is the increase from August: https://blog.playstation.com/2025/08/20/playstation-5-price-...

Nintendo much be in an especially hard place. They just released their new generation of consoles, but from what I hear holiday sales did "fine". Not great, fine. So they definitely don't want to stunt their entire generation by raisig their prices in the first year while they are already worried about hardware sales. Maybe that's a part of why they recently reported the price differences between physical and digital games.