Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts

Op-ed: Slowed manufacturing advancements are upending the way tech progresses.

May 4, 2025 - 13:38

Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts

For many, many years, I wouldn't get a new game console until a couple years after it launched. This was partly because I wanted any new console I bought to have a decent-sized library of things to play, and partly because it sometimes paid to sit back and see which console was going to "win" the generation in terms of first-party exclusives and third-party developer support.

But mostly it was because, from the Atari VCS in the 70s all the way up through the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation in the 2010s, you could always count on game consoles getting cheaper as time went on. Those price reductions would often also come with internal tweaks and external redesigns—smaller or slimmer or otherwise improved versions of the console that made them superior to the originals (though you would occasionally lose a lesser-used feature or two along the way).

But both of those things have mostly stopped. The last permanent price drop for a major home or portable console we could find came back in 2016, when the PS4 Slim launched and dropped the price of entry from $349 to $299 (this doesn't count the launch of new editions of consoles with reduced feature sets, like the New Nintendo 2DS in 2017 or $249 all-digital Xbox One in 2019). This generation, we've seen something that would have been unheard of a few years ago: price increases for consoles, including $50 extra for the new OLED edition of the Nintendo Switch in 2021, a $50 price hike for the slimmer disc-drive-less version of the PlayStation 5 in 2023, and $80 to $100 price hikes for the exact same unimproved versions of the Xbox Series S and X earlier this week.

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