1. Moore's law dying means that older nodes are still very useful, so there's still lots of people bidding for capacity on these 8 or whatever year old foundry nodes who are willing to pay lots of money, meaning that base costs of the CPU and GPU haven't fallen as quickly as one would expect even in the absence of 2-4.
2. The Pandemic and then Russia's invasion of Ukraine screwed with supply chains quite a bit, and caused an inflationary spike.
3. Trump's tariffs affected the profitability of these consoles, and inserted a lot of uncertainty into them because nobody knows how the tariffs situation will evolve over time, or if Sony will get reimbursed or not for the illegal tariffs that were levied against them. The uncertainty and general animosity towards the USA has also caused the US Dollar to slump in value relative to a lot of currencies, which then pressures Sony to raise prices.
4. The current RAM, SSD, and GPU shortages caused by LLM hyperscalers is again spiking the costs of their components
Significant pain is coming as fallout from the Iran war as well.
The price of raw plastic from our plastic mold houses has tripled recently as there's a shortage of raw input....
I recall that the PS1 memory cards used flash memory that was just invented in 1994.
My guess is that this is because the USA was the last holdout region for the Xbox having any degree of market penetration, so they kept prices there low in order to totally kill the Xbox, and have now decided that it's time to start recovering those lost margins.
Nintendo much be in an especially hard place. They just released their new generation of consoles, but from what I hear holiday sales did "fine". Not great, fine. So they definitely don't want to stunt their entire generation by raisig their prices in the first year while they are already worried about hardware sales. Maybe that's a part of why they recently reported the price differences between physical and digital games.
Especially because they were willing to piss off their lucrative European and Asian customers by raising *their* prices in response to US tariffs instead of raising the prices in the USA, effectively making all their worldwide customers subsidize lower costs in the USA.
