Back at the start of May, Xbox announced that the prices of consoles, games and accessories would be going up in various regions across the world, with particularly major increases for the Series X and Series S in the United States.
This will inevitibly result in fewer sales going forward for the two systems, but it was clearly a key move in Microsoft's eyes. What the company perhaps didn't anticipate was that the PS5 would receive a discount soon afterwards.
As part of the Days of Play 2025 sale, the PS5 was slashed to as low as $399.99 for the digital version, representing a $150 saving on the new price for the digital Xbox Series X. And, speaking on a recent episode of his YouTube channel, journalist Brad Sams (who publicised the leak of the Xbox Series S back in 2020) had the following to say:
"This is just a self-inflicted wound that Microsoft could have very easily avoided. Yes, they probably were going to raise prices anyway, but if you know that your competitor always has a sale right around the first week of June, and you know that it always drives a lot of headlines because of it, maybe just wait. Do they really make that much more money between then and now?"
Sams went on to speculate that Microsoft felt Sony wouldn't run a sale on PS5 consoles this year due to challenging market conditions, suggesting there was some naivety on their part if that was the case.
Of course, the other possibility is that Microsoft simply doesn't care what Sony and the PS5 are doing anymore. There's a big push these days on making everything an "Xbox" beyond just consoles, so there's no longer a heavy reliance on Xbox Series X|S sales - at least not as much as there used to be.
Personally, I can't imagine Microsoft just ignoring the fact that Sony hosts sales like these at the same time every year. It makes sense that they probably should have waited an extra month before opting for these price increases, but maybe it also shows that the company truly isn't interested in what PlayStation is doing with its consoles anymore.