With the new PlayStation 5, the price of accessories will go up in Japan, and you’ll have to pay extra for the stand if you want to use it vertically…
We’ve already written about the PlayStation 5 Slim here, but there are a few more details to go into. The company has announced on the Japanese PlayStation Blog that accessories will be subject to a price increase in the Asian island nation. The white or black DualSense controller will cost 9480 yen/$63.7 (currently 7678, a price increase of nearly 23.5%), and the other colours (pink, purple, blue, grey) will cost 9980 yen/$67.1 (currently 8228, a price increase of 21.3%). The Pulse 3D headset will cost 12980 yen/$87.3 (currently 10978, up 18.24%), the HD camera 7980 yen/$53.65 (instead of 6578, up 21.3%) and the remote control 3980/$26.76 (up 21.41%, currently 3278 yen). So they are charging 18-22% more for everything, which is not an insignificant price increase…
The PlayStation 5 currently on sale comes with a stand so you can use it upright. Sony is not going to include this in the new version and is going to charge us €30 for it! Instead, we’ll be able to use the smaller console horizontally, with a kickstand that we’ve seen on bicycles. Thanks for nothing, Sony: it wouldn’t have been surprising if this had been left out of the package.
But the term ‘shrinkflation’ in the title certainly applies to the PlayStation 5 Slim. Too often in shops you see that the price of a product has not changed, but the size of the packaging has. This is the shrinkflation that Sony has demonstrated with its hardware: the current-generation console is getting smaller, but the price is NOT! And that’s what the company is trying to hide once again: it’s usual for the slim version of a console to be accompanied by a price drop, but this time it’s not the case: the price of last autumn remains the same!
It would at least be fair to return to the old prices (€500 for the Blu-ray drive model, €400 for the Digital Edition), but we can forget about that.
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