After the news about the upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro reveal, it's time to bring the mood back down a bit. Sony seems to have made a stealth change to the cost of their PlayStation 5 DualSense controllers. Every model and color will now cost you $5 more than it did prior to today.
The price increase seems to have been spotted first by Wario64. In searching around, Wario64 noted that many retailers recently bumped the price up on all DualSense controllers by $5. Sony's own PlayStation Direct store is now $75, an increase of $5 from the $70 it used to retail for. Special DualSense models, such as the new Astro Bot-themed controller, have also gone up by at least $5. Outside of North America, some regions saw price increases on the DualSense increase by as much as $10.
Sony has not made any sort of announcement concerning this price increase as they did when increasing the cost of PlayStation Plus in 2023. A price increase for the revised slimmer PlayStation 5 model that followed a couple of months later in 2023 was also accompanied by an official announcement. Before that price increase, Sony had already increased the price of the PlayStation 5 by 20% in most global regions except for the United States. More recently, Sony officially announced another price increase on the PlayStation 5 of 13,000 yen (~$90) in Japan.
Typically, prices of console hardware decrease the longer a platform has been on the market. For example, the PlayStation 4 went from $400 to $350 roughly two years after release. The PlayStation 5, having been out now for four years, has only gone up in price since it launched.
A stealth price increase on the DualSense seems particularly egregious given how many issues there have been with the DualSense controller since it came out. Most notably, there have been countless reports of stick drift on all DualSense models. I, in fact, saw stick drift on my third-generation DualSense controller after less than a year of rather light use. I talk about that very issue in my recent review for the Phantom controller from HexGaming.
