After increasing the prices of the PlayStation 5 for the American market, Sony is now reportedly downgrading the hardware of European PS5 variants. The price will remain the same, though these new consoles will come with around 20 percent less storage than their older selves.

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Hardware has been slowly increasing in price over the past few years, with things picking up the pace post-COVID. This doesn’t only affect consoles, as PC parts and other gaming paraphernalia have gone up, slowly but surely, with the “mid-range” of today corresponding in cost to what the high-end used to be. On top of that, the recent tariffs introduced by the U.S. government have contributed to an increase in hardware produced outside of America, which is just about everything gaming-related.

These market trends led Sony to hike up the price of the PS5 in the United States, while the core product itself remained the same. This cannot be said for the European market, where, according to Kotaku (via Dealabs) Sony is planning to downgrade its console hardware while keeping prices the same. If true, new digital PlayStation 5 consoles will be sold with 825GB of storage instead of the previous 1TB, which is about 20 percent less than before.

These changes will only affect the digital PS5 version. Image via Sony

With prices remaining the same, Sony could potentially improve its profit margins by cutting down on hardware production costs.

The disc-drive PlayStation 5 will remain unaffected by this change, at least for now.

While one’d think 825GB is still a lot of storage (and, to some degree, it is), that extra 200GB could account for at least two massive AAA titles, which nowadays are quite hungry for storage. That is, if you’re not a CoD player, which would mean those 200GB of extra drive space would be reserved only for Activision’s finest.

Either way, it’s a good chunk of change in storage terms, and a significant downgrade for those with poorer internet connections where uninstall-reinstall cycles are simply too inconvenient.

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