gaming

switch-modder-owes-nintendo-$2-million-after-representing-himself-in-court

Switch modder owes Nintendo $2 million after representing himself in court

daly, gaming, hacking, legal, mig, mig switch, modding, Nintendo, Payment, settlement / /

Daly’s pro se legal representation in the case was notable for its use of several novel affirmative defenses, including arguments that Nintendo’s “alleged copyrights are invalid,” that Nintendo “does not have standing to bring suit,” and that Nintendo “procured a contract [with Daly] through fraudulent means.” For the record, the judgment in this case reasserts that Nintendo “owns valid copyrights in works protected by the TPMs, including Nintendo games and the Nintendo Switch operating system.”

In addition to $2 million in damages, Daly is specifically barred from “obtaining, possessing, accessing, or using” any DRM circumvention device or hacked console, with or without the intent to sell it. The judgment also bars Daly from publishing or “linking to” any website with instructions for hacking consoles and from “reverse engineering” any Nintendo consoles or games. Control of Daly’s ModdedHardware.com domain name will also be transferred to Nintendo.

Nintendo’s latest legal victory comes years after a $4.5 million plea deal with Gary “GaryOPA” Bowser, one of the leaders behind Team Xecuter and its SX line of Switch hacking devices. Bowser also served 14 months of a 40-month prison sentence in that case and said last year that he will likely be paying Nintendo back for the rest of his life.

Switch modder owes Nintendo $2 million after representing himself in court Read More »

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All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity

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Last year, we reported on the efforts of classic iPod fans to preserve playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel games that Apple sold for a brief period in the late ’00s. The community was working to get around Apple’s onerous FairPlay DRM by having people who still owned original copies of those (now unavailable) games sync their accounts to a single iTunes installation via a coordinated Virtual Machine. That “master library” would then be able to provide playable copies of those games to any number of iPods in perpetuity.

At the time, the community was still searching for iPod owners with syncable copies of the last few titles needed for their library. With today’s addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.

All at once, then slowly

GitHub user Olsro, the originator of the iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project, tells Ars that he lucked into contact with three people who had large iPod game libraries in the first month or so after the project’s launch last October. That includes one YouTuber who had purchased and maintained copies of 39 distinct games, even repurchasing some of the upgraded versions Apple sold separately for later iPod models.

Ars’ story on the project shook out a few more iPod owners with syncable iPod game libraries, and subsequent updates in the following days left just a handful of titles unpreserved. But that’s when the project stalled, Olsro said, with months wasted on false leads and technical issues that hampered the effort to get a complete library.

“I’ve put a lot of time into coaching people that [had problems] transferring the files and authorizing the account once with me on the [Virtual Machine],” Olsro told Ars. “But I kept motivation to continue coaching anyone else coming to me (by mail/Discord) and making regular posts to increase awareness until I could find finally someone that could, this time, go with me through all the steps of the preservation process,” he added on Reddit.

Getting this working copy of Real Soccer 2009 was an “especially cursed” process, Olsro said.

Getting this working copy of Real Soccer 2009 was an “especially cursed” process, Olsro said. Credit: Olsro / Reddit

Getting working access to the final unpreserved game, Real Soccer 2009, was “especially cursed,” Olsro tells Ars. “Multiple [people] came to me during this summer and all attempts failed until a new one from yesterday,” he said. “I even had a situation when someone had an iPod Nano 5G with a playable copy of Real Soccer, but the drive was appearing empty in the Windows Explorer. He tried recovery tools & the iPod NAND just corrupted itself, asking for recovery…”

All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity Read More »

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Civilization VII team at Firaxis Games faces layoffs

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However, it’s important to note that neither of those metrics gives as complete a picture as some Internet discussions suggest they do; Civilization VII launched on other platforms and game stores like the PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Epic Game Store, and those wouldn’t be captured in Steam numbers—even though it intuitively seems likely that Steam would account for the significant majority of players for this particular franchise. Twitch viewership is also not necessarily representative of sales or the number of players.

It’s also difficult to know for sure whether the layoffs are tied to the game’s performance.

Just a month ago, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that while the game had a “slow start,” he believes “Civ has always been a slow burn.” He said the projections for the “lifetime value of the title” are consistent with the company’s initial projections.

There have been numerous other examples of studios and publishers laying off staff from teams that worked on both successful and unsuccessful releases as the industry continues to roll back pandemic-era over-hiring and respond to inflation, rising borrowing costs, global economic instability, trade uncertainty, ballooning development costs, and efficiency pressures.

Civilization VII team at Firaxis Games faces layoffs Read More »

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Dev says Switch 2’s physical Game Cards were too slow for Star Wars Outlaws port

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A video shows how different storage media can affect Mario Kart World load times.

CD Projekt Red VP of Technology Charles Tremblay has alluded to this same challenge when talking about the Switch 2 port of Cyberpunk 2077. In a June interview with IGN, Tremblay said the data transfer speeds enabled by MicroSD Express were “great,” while streaming data from a Switch 2 Game Card was merely “okay.” Tremblay did go on to say that “all the performance we have on [input/output] is very good on [the Switch 2],” especially compared to the extremely slow physical hard drives that plagued Cyberpunk 2077‘s performance on older hardware.

Slow down, you move too fast

From the outside, it’s a bit odd that Nintendo allowed this loading-speed dichotomy to exist on the Switch 2 in the first place. On the original Switch, read speeds for both SD cards and Game Cards reportedly maxed out around 90 MB/s. But when designing the new Switch 2 game cards, Nintendo settled on a format that would stream data much more slowly than for downloaded games on the same console.

That decision might have been an attempt to minimize hardware costs for the Switch 2’s Game Card interface. If so, though, it doesn’t seem to have done much to reduce the costs of manufacturing Switch 2 game cards themselves. The cost of manufacturing those physical Game Cards has been frequently cited as a major reason many publishers are using cheaper Game Key Cards in the first place, though Bantin said that he “[didn’t] recall the cost of the cards ever entering the discussion [for Star Wars: Outlaws]—probably because it was moot.”

Nintendo could get around this variable loading speed issue by letting players pre-install games from a Switch 2 Game Card to internal or expansion storage, as Microsoft and Sony have either allowed or required on their disc-based consoles for decades now. But that solution might prove onerous for physical game card players who want to avoid clogging up the limited 256GB of internal storage on the Switch 2 (and/or avoid investing in pricey MicroSD Express cards).

As time goes on, many developers will likely learn how to adapt to and tolerate the Switch 2’s relatively slow Game Card interface. But as gamers and the industry at large continue to transition away from physical media, some developers might decide it’s not worth compromising on loading speeds just to satisfy a shrinking portion of the market.

Dev says Switch 2’s physical Game Cards were too slow for Star Wars Outlaws port Read More »

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Hollow Knight: Silksong is breaking Steam, Nintendo’s eShop

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An influx of players excited for this morning’s launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong are encountering widespread errors purchasing and downloading the game from Steam this morning. Ars Technica writers have encountered errors getting store pages to load, adding the game to an online shopping cart, and checking out once the game is part of the cart.

That aligns with widespread social media complaints and data from DownDetector, which saw a sudden spike of over 11,000 reports of problems with Steam in the minutes following Silksong‘s 10 am Eastern time release on Steam. The server problems don’t seem to be completely stopping everyone, though, as SteamDB currently reports over 100,000 concurrent players for Silksong as of this writing.

Ars also encountered some significant delays and/or outright errors when downloading other games and updates and syncing cloud saves on Steam during this morning’s server problems. The Humble Store page for Silksong currently warns North American purchasers that “We have run out of Steam keys for Hollow Knight: Silksong in your region, but more are on their way! As soon as we receive more Steam keys, we will add them to your download page. Sorry about the delay!”

The PC version of Silksong currently seems to be available for purchase and download without issue. Ars was also able to purchase and download the Switch 2 version of Silksong from the Nintendo eShop without encountering any errors, though others have reported problems with that online storefront [Update: As of 11:18 am, Nintendo is reporting, “The [Nintendo eShop] network service is unavailable at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause].” The game is still listed as merely “Announced” and not available for purchase on its PlayStation Store page as of this writing.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is breaking Steam, Nintendo’s eShop Read More »

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Battlefield 6 dev apologizes for requiring Secure Boot to power anti-cheat tools

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Earlier this month, EA announced that players in its Battlefield 6 open beta on PC would have to enable Secure Boot in their Windows OS and BIOS settings. That decision proved controversial among players who weren’t able to get the finicky low-level security setting working on their machines and others who were unwilling to allow EA’s anti-cheat tools to once again have kernel-level access to their systems.

Now, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl is defending that requirement as something of a necessary evil to combat cheaters, even as he apologizes to any potential players that it has kept away.

“The fact is I wish we didn’t have to do things like Secure Boot,” Buhl said in an interview with Eurogamer. “It does prevent some players from playing the game. Some people’s PCs can’t handle it and they can’t play: that really sucks. I wish everyone could play the game with low friction and not have to do these sorts of things.”

Throughout the interview, Buhl admits that even requiring Secure Boot won’t completely eradicate cheating in Battlefield 6 long term. Even so, he offered that the Javelin anti-cheat tools enabled by Secure Boot’s low-level system access were “some of the strongest tools in our toolbox to stop cheating. Again, nothing makes cheating impossible, but enabling Secure Boot and having kernel-level access makes it so much harder to cheat and so much easier for us to find and stop cheating.”

Too much security, or not enough?

When announcing the Secure Boot requirement in a Steam forum post prior to the open beta, EA explained that having Secure Boot enabled “provides us with features that we can leverage against cheats that attempt to infiltrate during the Windows boot process.” Having access to the Trusted Platform Module on the motherboard via Secure Boot provides the anti-cheat team with visibility into things like kernel-level cheats and rootkits, memory manipulation, injection spoofing, hardware ID manipulation, the use of virtual machines, and attempts to tamper with anti-cheat systems, the company wrote.

Battlefield 6 dev apologizes for requiring Secure Boot to power anti-cheat tools Read More »

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Today’s game consoles are historically overpriced

gaming / /

Overall, though, you can see a clear and significant downward trend to the year-over-year pricing for game consoles released before 2016. After three years on the market, the median game console during this period cost less than half as much (on an inflation-adjusted basis) as it did at launch. Consoles that stuck around on the market long enough could expect further slow price erosion over time, until they were selling for roughly 43 percent of their launch price in year five and about 33 percent in year eight.

That kind of extreme price-cutting is a distant memory for today’s game consoles. By year three, the median console currently on the market costs about 85 percent of its real launch price, thanks to the effects of inflation. By year five, that median launch price ratio for modern consoles actually increases to 92 percent, thanks to the nominal price increases that many consoles have seen in their fourth or fifth years on the market. And the eight-year-old Nintendo Switch is currently selling for about 86 percent of its inflation-adjusted launch price, or more than 50 percentage points higher than the median trend for earlier long-lived consoles.

While the data is noisy, the overall trend in older console pricing over time is very clear. Kyle Orland

To be fair, today’s game consoles are not the most expensive the industry has ever seen. Systems like the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Neo Geo, and 3DO launched at prices that would be well over $1,000 in 2025 money. More recently, systems like the PS3 ($949.50 at launch in 2025 dollars) and Xbox One ($689.29 at launch in 2025 dollars) were significantly pricier than the $300 to $600 range that encompasses most of today’s consoles.

But when classic consoles launched at such high prices, those prices never lasted very long. Even the most expensive console launches of the past dropped in price quickly enough that, by year three or so, they were down to inflation-adjusted prices comparable to today’s consoles. And classic consoles that launched at more reasonable prices usually saw price cuts that took them well into the sub-$300 range (in 2025 dollars) within a few years, making them a relative bargain from today’s perspective.

Today’s game consoles are historically overpriced Read More »

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Chris Roberts hopes Squadron 42 will be “almost as big” as GTA VI next year

gaming / /

The long and winding road

It’s hard to remember now, but Star Citizen‘s then-impressive $6.3 million Kickstarter campaign came just a few months before Grand Theft Auto V first launched on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (remember those?). But development on Rockstar’s long-awaited sequel didn’t start in earnest until 2020, publisher Take Two says, around the time Star Citizen developer Roberts Space Industries was settling a contentious lawsuit over game engine rights and rolling out a new development roadmap for the game.

A graph visualizing the growing crowdfunding for Star Citizen from 2012 (top) through 2022 (bottom).

A graph visualizing the growing crowdfunding for Star Citizen from 2012 (top) through 2022 (bottom). Credit: Reddit / Rainbowles

Of course, the development of Grand Theft Auto VI has happened completely behind closed doors, with developer Rockstar and publisher Take Two only occasionally offering tiny drops of information to a desperate press and fan base. By contrast, Roberts Space Industries has issued regular, incredibly detailed information dumps on the drawn-out development progress for Star Citizen and Squadron 42, even when that kind of openness has contributed to the public appearance of internal dysfunction.

The massive, ongoing crowdfunding that powers the open development structure “allows us to do things without imposing the framework of a typical video game studio,” Roberts told La Presse. “The players who fund us expect the best game, period. We don’t have to streamline, cut jobs, or change our business model.”

That pre-launch development cycle must eventually end, of course, and the La Presse report suggests that the full 1.0 release of Star Citizen is “now promised” for “2027 or 2028.” While we’d love to believe that, the history of Star Citizen development thus far (and the lack of any provided sourcing for the claim) makes us more than a little skeptical.

Chris Roberts hopes Squadron 42 will be “almost as big” as GTA VI next year Read More »

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The Outer Worlds 2 wants you to join the space police

gaming / /

Then there’s the way the game stresses a number of early dialogue choices, telling you how your fellow agents will remember when you choose to treat them with eager support or stern rebuke at key moments. Without getting too much into early game spoilers, I’ll say that the medium-term consequences of these kinds of decisions are not always obvious; concerned players might want to keep a few save files handy for gaming out the “best” outcomes from their choices.

Bang bang

The early moment-to-moment gameplay in The Outer Worlds 2 will be broadly familiar to those who played the original game, right down to the Tactical Time Dilation device that slows down enemies enough for you to line up a perfect headshot (though not enough for Max Payne-style acrobatics, unfortunately). But I did find myself missing the first game’s zippy double-jump-style dodging system, which doesn’t seem to be available in the prologue of the sequel, at least.

Shooting feels pretty clean and impactful in the early game firefights.

Credit: Obsidian / Kyle Orland

Shooting feels pretty clean and impactful in the early game firefights. Credit: Obsidian / Kyle Orland

The game’s first action setpiece lets you explicitly choose whether to go in guns blazing or focus on stealth and sneak attacks, but characters that invest in conversational skills might find they’re able to talk their way past some of the early encounters. When it comes time to engage in a firefight, thus far I’ve found the “Normal” difficulty to be laughably easy, while the “Hard” difficulty is a bit too punishing, making me wish for more fine-tuning.

The prologue stops before I was able to engage with important elements like the leveling system or the allied computer-controlled companions, making it a rather incomplete picture of the full game. Still, it was enough to whet my appetite for what seems set to be another tongue-in-cheek take on the space adventure genre.

The Outer Worlds 2 wants you to join the space police Read More »

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Framework Laptop 16 update brings Nvidia GeForce to the modular gaming laptop

AMD, framework, framework laptop, framework laptop 16, gaming, NVIDIA, Ryzen, Tech / /

It’s been a busy year for Framework, the company behind the now well-established series of repairable, upgradeable, modular laptops (and one paradoxically less-upgradeable desktop). The company has launched a version of the Framework Laptop 13 with Ryzen AI processors, the new Framework Laptop 12, and the aforementioned desktop in the last six months, and last week, Framework teased that it still had “something big coming.”

That “something big” turns out to be the first-ever update to the Framework Laptop 16, Framework’s more powerful gaming-laptop-slash-mobile-workstation. Framework is updating the laptop with Ryzen AI processors and new integrated Radeon GPUs and is introducing a new graphics module with the mobile version of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070—one that’s also fully compatible with the original Laptop 16, for upgraders.

Preorders for the new laptop open today, and pricing starts at $1,499 for a DIY Edition without RAM, storage, an OS, or Expansion Cards, a $100 increase from the price of the first Framework Laptop 16. The first units will begin shipping in November.

While Framework has launched multiple updates for its original Laptop 13, this is the first time it has updated the hardware of one of its other computers. We wouldn’t expect the just-launched Framework Laptop 12 or Framework Desktop to get an internal overhaul any time soon, but the Laptop 16 will be pushing 2-years-old by the time this upgrade launches.

The old Ryzen 7 7840HS CPU version of the Laptop 16 will still be available going forward at a slightly reduced starting price of $1,299 (for the DIY edition, before RAM and storage). The Ryzen 9 7940HS model will stick around until it sells out, at which point Framework says it’s going away.

GPU details and G-Sync asterisks

The Laptop 16’s new graphics module and cooling system, also exploded. Credit: Framework

This RTX 5070 graphics module includes a redesigned heatsink and fan system, plus an additional built-in USB-C port that supports both display output and power input (potentially freeing up one of your Expansion Card slots for something else). Because of the additional power draw of the GPU and the other new components, Framework is switching to a 240 W default power supply for the new Framework Laptop 16, up from the previous 180 W power brick.

Framework Laptop 16 update brings Nvidia GeForce to the modular gaming laptop Read More »

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Explaining the Internet’s obsession with Silksong, which (finally) comes out Sept. 4

gaming, hollow knight, hollow knight silksong, silksong / /

Hollow Knight fans found strange ways to cope with impatience and anticipation.

Hornet, the enigmatic protagonist of Hollow Knight: Silksong. Credit: Team Cherry

Hornet, the enigmatic protagonist of Hollow Knight: Silksong. Credit: Team Cherry

Hollow Knight: Silksong will be released on September 4. It will come out simultaneously on Windows, macOS, Linux, Xbox, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, the Nintendo Switch, and the Nintendo Switch 2.

On paper, “game gets release date” isn’t particularly groundbreaking news, and the six-year wait between the game’s announcement and release is long but nowhere near record-breaking. People have waited longer for Metroid Prime 4 (announced 2017, releasing this fall), Duke Nukem Forever (announced 1997, released 2011), the fourth BioShock game (in development for a decade at a studio that just got ravaged by layoffs), and Half-Life 3 (never actually announced, but hope springs eternal), just to name a few.

But fans of 2017’s Hollow Knight managed to make the wait for Silksong into a meme. It’s hard to explain why if you haven’t already been following along, but it’s probably got something to do with the expected scale of the game, the original Hollow Knight‘s popularity, and the almost total silence of the small staff at Team Cherry, the game’s developer.

Why does this game make people act this way?

Silksong began development as downloadable content for Hollow Knight, a gloomy Metroidvania about a silent, unnamed protagonist battling their way through the fallen insect kingdom of Hallownest. Funded via Kickstarter, Hollow Knight became a huge hit thanks to its distinctive 2D art style, atmospheric soundtrack, sharp and satisfying gameplay, memorable boss fights, and worldbuilding that gave players just enough information to encourage endless speculation about Hallownest’s rise and fall.

The expansion, first mentioned all the way back in 2014, would focus on Hornet, who fought her battles with a needle and thread. She had been an NPC in the main game but would become a fully playable character in the DLC.

By February of 2019, Team Cherry announced that the Hornet DLC had become “too large and too unique to stay a DLC” and would instead be “a full-scale sequel to Hollow Knight.”

And then, silence. Hollow Knight had been developed mostly out in the open, with a steady cadence of updates posted to Kickstarter about the game and its DLC. But whatever was going on with Silksong was happening behind closed doors. Status updates came, at best, once or twice a year, and usually amounted to “they’re still working on it.”

Since then, Hollow Knight has only become a bigger hit, and Silksong has only gotten more anticipated. Team Cherry said Hollow Knight had sold 2.8 million copies as of early 2019 when the Silksong announcement went out. As of today, that number is over 15 million, and almost 5 million people have come together to make Silksong into Steam’s most-wishlisted game by a margin of nearly 2:1.

The first game’s popularity, sky-high expectations for the second game, and the near-total information vacuum meant that every single scrap of Silksong news, no matter how small, was pored over and picked apart by a constellation of Reddit threads and SEO-friendly news posts. People spotted and speculated about the significance of tiny Steam database updates, new listings in digital game stores, and purported ESRB ratings, trying to divine whether the game was getting any closer to release.

People could even make news out of a lack of news, an art form perfected by a DailySilksongNews channel on YouTube with hundreds of videos and 220,000 subscribers (“There has been no news to report for Silksong today,” host Cory M. deadpans in one of the channel’s typical update videos).

Silksong will inherit and build upon the striking 2D art style of the original Hollow Knight. Credit: Team Cherry

This cottage industry’s collective frustration hit a peak in mid 2023. At an Xbox game showcase in June of 2022, Silksong gameplay footage was included in a reel of games that were meant to be released “within the next 12 months.” In the 11th month of that 12-month wait, an update came down from Team Cherry: the game wouldn’t be out in the first half of 2023 after all, and there would be no updated estimate about its release window.

Since then, Silksong fans have descended upon every livestreamed game announcement that could possibly include a Silksong reveal, spamming clown memes and joking about how the game is just around the corner. I myself changed my Discord avatar to a picture of the Knight in a clown wig and red nose, temporarily, just until Silksong came out. This was over three years ago, and at this point I worry that changing the avatar to something else will confuse the people in my servers too much. The mask has become my face.

What took so long?

Patient and impatient Silksong fans alike will find some denouement in Jason Schreier’s Bloomberg interview with Team Cherry, in which the game’s developers break their silence on why the game took so long and why they communicated so little about it.

The prolonged development apparently didn’t come down to a lack of enthusiasm, or burnout, or staffing problems, or the pandemic, or any of the other things that have delayed so many other games. Team Cherry co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen say that the delay has been for the most wholesome reason possible: they were having so much fun making Silksong that it was hard to stop.

“You’re always working on a new idea, new item, new area, new boss,” Pellen told Bloomberg. “That stuff’s so nice. It’s for the sake of just completing the game that we’re stopping. We could have kept going.”

“I remember at some point I just had to stop sketching,” said Gibson. “Because I went, ‘Everything I’m drawing here has to end up in the game. That’s a cool idea, that’s in. That’s a cool idea, that’s in.’ You realize, ‘If I don’t stop drawing, this is going to take 15 years to finish.'”

In addition to over 200 distinct enemies and an all-new map, Silksong will build on Hollow Knight‘s progression and exploration by adding a new quest system that will encourage re-exploration of different areas of the map. The team had conceived of this as a way to add depth to what they originally expected would be a smaller world map than Hollow Knight‘s—but instead, they added that depth and then built a huge game around it anyway. Tying all of these ideas together and applying a consistent level of polish to them also added time to the process.

The game’s katamari-like growth apparently made it difficult to estimate when it would be done, and a desire to avoid spoiling the game for its future players meant that the team just ended up not talking about it much.

“There was a period of two to three years when I thought it was going to come out within a year,” said Pellen.

In the last few months, there’s been a growing sense that the game’s release was finally coming, for real this time. An Australian museum announced that it would be showcasing the game as part of an exhibit starting in September. Silksong was listed as a playable game for Microsoft and Asus’ Xbox-themed handheld ROG Ally PC, which itself just got a mid-October release date yesterday. News of a “special announcement” about Silksong went out on August 19, and we finally got our release date today.

Gibson and Pellen have mostly ignored the weird Internet subcultures that have developed around the game, though they are aware that those intense slices of their fanbase exist.

“Feels like we’re going to ruin their fun by releasing the game,” said Pellen.

Fans who have engaged in the sport of Waiting For Silksong will still have something to look forward to. Gibson and Pellen said that they plan to keep working on the game, and Silksong should see a fair amount of post-release DLC just like the original Hollow Knight did. But some of those plans are “ambitious,” and Team Cherry isn’t ready to talk about timing yet.

That means that even the game’s release isn’t going to stop a certain type of person on the Internet from asking their favorite question: Silksong when?

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

Explaining the Internet’s obsession with Silksong, which (finally) comes out Sept. 4 Read More »

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Sony makes the “difficult decision” to raise PlayStation 5 prices in the US

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Sony will join Microsoft and Nintendo in raising US prices across its entire game console lineup, the company announced today. Pricing for all current versions of the PlayStation 5 console will increase by $50 starting tomorrow.

The price of the PS5 Digital Edition will increase from $450 to $500; the standard PS5 will increase from $500 to $550; and the PS5 Pro will increase from $700 to $750. If you’ve been on the fence about buying any of these, retailers like Target and Best Buy are still using the old prices as of this writing—for other console price hikes, retailers have sometimes bumped the prices up before the date announced by the manufacturer.

“Similar to many global businesses, we continue to navigate a challenging economic environment,” wrote Sony Global Marketing VP Isabelle Tomatis. “As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to increase the recommended retail price for PlayStation 5 consoles in the U.S. starting on August 21.”

Sony says it’s not increasing prices for games or accessories and that this round of price increases only affects consoles sold in the US.

Sony was the last of the big three console makers to raise prices this year. Microsoft raised the prices for the Xbox Series S and X consoles in March. And Nintendo has gone through two rounds of price increases—one for Switch and Switch 2 accessories in April and another for more accessories and Switch 1 consoles earlier this month.

Sony makes the “difficult decision” to raise PlayStation 5 prices in the US Read More »