We’re already hearing sales figures from the Asian island nation, where the PlayStation 5 (as well as the DualSense controller and PlayStation VR2) will see a significant price increase of around 20% in the coming days.

Automaton reports that Yodobashi, one of Japan’s largest retailers, has seen the Xbox Series X move up to eighth place in its top list after PlayStation announced another price hike. This is an important result as the console was not even in the top 100 the day before the price hike. Since Sony announced the price increase, Microsoft’s product has become much more attractive as it is now the equivalent of $100 cheaper. And the stock before the price hike was all sold out, so many people might have been immediately reassured by the price hike if they hadn’t been able to decide to buy one…

In Japan, both the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S have been struggling since their launch, so this result is great news for the Redmond company, as Microsoft is now preparing to release two new models. On the one hand, there’s the Xbox Series X All-Digital (i.e. without Blu-ray drive), which will have 2 TB of storage instead of 1 TB (rumors suggest that the PlayStation 5 Pro will also get an NVMe SSD of this size, we’ve written about this before); on the other hand, there’s a new color for the Xbox Series S.

The announcement of the price hike is rather badly timed, as Sony has about two weeks to announce the PlayStation 5 Pro, which could be a very strong visual console due to its PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) scaling technology. But if the company asks too much for it, it’s not so sure that it will immediately win over Japanese gamers, who may opt for the Xbox Series X instead.

So, congratulations to Sony, and we (sarcastically) look forward to the announcement of another price hike in the West, blaming the global economic situation…

Source: WCCFTech, Automaton