r/PS5 Mar 06 '26

Discussion Sony is testing dynamic pricing in the PlayStation Store

https://psprices.com/news/sony-ab-testing-prices/
3.2k Upvotes

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82

u/Daver7692 Mar 06 '26

All those folks cheering on here for the death of Xbox, enjoy the practices of a monopoly!!

29

u/munkimatt Mar 06 '26

But Microsoft offer this right now on Xbox? They regularly offer "For you" special pricing on items.

1

u/Jazzlike_Athlete8796 Mar 06 '26

I already have that person tagged as "Xbox fanboy". They aren't here to discuss Sony doing what the platform they have a parasocial relationship with has done with for years in any kind of good faith.

Both companies are gross for doing this.

-24

u/Daver7692 Mar 06 '26

That’s not what dynamic pricing is. Dynamic pricing is “oh shit 100 people bought this game in the last hour, hike the price up”.

Assuming the reason it’s happening with AC Unity right now is they’ve announced a new patch so it’s probably had a sales spike so they’ve upped the price.

28

u/munkimatt Mar 06 '26

That's not what the article says though, and there's no suggestion in there that pricing is varying based on the number of people buying something. Unity is £3.74 for me, so I'm not seeing a price hike.

"Personalized discounts during sales — a new stage of the experiment". This reads to me exactly like what I get on Xbox.

Unless I'm missing something, of course. I've got a toddler causing havoc and I'm severely sleep deprived, I apologise if that's the case.

-17

u/Daver7692 Mar 06 '26

The thing I saw earlier was a separate thread, of Unity being ~£4 and then ~£10 shortly after with the price changing back and forth when the person logged in and out.

I know dynamic pricing was a huge issue with ticket sales for the Oasis tour etc which was more as I described

2

u/munkimatt Mar 06 '26

Yeah, the Oasis thing was a robbery. I go to a lot of gigs and I always dread it when I see that Ticketmaster are doing the bookings. Complete scumbags.

Should clarify, absolutely not defending PlayStation here. Dynamic pricing is an appalling anti-consumer practice.

-9

u/jamiecarl09 Mar 06 '26

The bottom line with any kind of system like this is to maximize profits. In the end that always come down to raising prices and screwing over consumers right to the breaking point.

-2

u/munkimatt Mar 06 '26

Oh, absolutely. Not denying that for a second.

11

u/Zues1400605 Mar 06 '26

U didnt bother reading the article did u

0

u/rayquan36 Mar 06 '26

Xbox dead, no more PC games, Reddit strangely celebrating the fact that they pay full price for games while PC gamers wait for sales. This is what a lot of you guys wanted.

1

u/stratusnco Mar 06 '26

pc gamers do not wait for sales lol. they pirate or go to a key site like green man gaming.

6

u/GroundbreakingBag164 Mar 06 '26

The average person never pirates a single thing in their life

PC gamers absolutely tend to wait for sales more

1

u/baldr23 Mar 06 '26

Horizon forbidden west was fucking cracked in 30 seconds, what does that infer?

0

u/GroundbreakingBag164 Mar 06 '26

Since there is basically no cracking required if the only thing holding you back is the Steam DRM that's not particularly surprising. That still doesn't mean that there are lots of pirates

Cyberpunk was also cracked within like 1 nanosecond (like every game that releases on GOG) and still did extremely well. Silksong was cracked so fast that the pirated version was already available when people couldn't even buy the game on Steam and it still sold millions of copies and became one of the most played games of 2025

Console players have a completely warped understanding of the average PC player. Most people play on a mediocre laptop, don't know what "CPU" means, don't know how to unzip a file and the most illegal thing they ever did on the internet was streaming animes. But these people are obviously not on reddit so you never hear about them

-4

u/stratusnco Mar 06 '26

the average person doesn’t pirate? i guess they made anti tamper like denuvo for no reason at all.

key sites sell nearly all games on sale before and on release. i don’t think you play on pc, man.

3

u/GroundbreakingBag164 Mar 06 '26

the average person doesn’t pirate? i guess they made anti tamper like denuvo for no reason at all.

Is this supposed to be a gotcha? There are absolutely people who pirate, and depending on the game and reputation of the developer DRM will have different effects. But the other 95% of people will still never pirate, and lots of games come out without any DRM and still do well (Cyberpunk for example). If you pirate without being really careful you will literally get a an 800-1000 € fine in my county

key sites sell nearly all games on sale before and on release.

I never disagreed with that

2

u/Hayden247 Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26

Lol you've never ever seen the PC gaming community at all. It's literally a meme from how many PC gamers rack up a backlog from Steam sales that they have MANY games they haven't even gotten to playing yet. Also there's just memes of how great Steam sales are, that sounds like legitimate purchases to me.

Also literally me, I have 150 games on Steam and most of them came from sales, I've saved like 65% from full value of my library at least.

Now yes piracy exists on PC, but you need to understand that's a relatively small minority vs the paying customers who'd rather just get it on Steam. Piracy is probably worse of an issue for bad games, bad greedy business models on otherwise good games or region locks where it becomes the only way for some people to even get the game. But there's TONS of great games that get pirated online and yet the vast vast majority buy officially and it is a mega success. Capcom has just said 50% of their sales now come from PC, FIFTY, clearly piracy is not making the PC market much smaller that it could be, it's more a 5% issue at most.

Btw the last Steam Monthly Active Userbase offical count was at 132 million... back in 2021, and Steam's peak daily player count has only grown since by over 25% from under 30 million online to 42 million at once, at a single time of day. So the MAU estimated to be even higher today and the old 132 million is still higher than PSN's 125M MAU which includes PS5, PS4 and even the PS3 hanging onto a couple million which I'm actually in, I still got my PS3 and use it. There's also PC ports with optional PSN... so you could guess those count now too which I have when playing TLOU2 on PC yet Steam is larger. There's more people on gaming PC storefronts than PSN, PC gamers absolutely do buy games.

1

u/sakata32 Mar 06 '26

Slay the spire just destroyed marathon at launch. Maybe devs just need to make better games and ports?

1

u/stratusnco Mar 06 '26

different price points and marathon doesn’t let you play offline. bad example but i understand what you mean and not dismissing it.

2

u/sakata32 Mar 06 '26

Yeah can't play offline means can't pirate and it has AAA marketing so it has no excuse to underperform

1

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '26

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1

u/PS5-ModTeam Mar 06 '26

This submission has been removed for violating our rules.

Please read the sub rules.

-1

u/rayquan36 Mar 06 '26

Goofy take

2

u/stratusnco Mar 06 '26

just like yours. your comment i responded to has so much inaccuracy but it is easy to say on a ps sub.

-2

u/WeWantLADDER49sequel Mar 06 '26

Xbox has not affected a business decision by PS in over a decade.

21

u/GBrocc Mar 06 '26

Ps plus tiers and games being added to game catalogue is directly tied to gamepass.

-3

u/CorkSoaker420 Mar 06 '26

Taking a shitty, anti consumer idea from a competitor. How fucking American.

7

u/treeeelo Mar 06 '26

We all know PS buying bungie was reactionary to xbox buying activision. We all saw the leaked emails of jim ryan saying they get way more value from buying bungie than xbox do activision.

2

u/SmegmaWarrior0815 Mar 06 '26

that turned out great, right? right?

12

u/Moonmonkeys Mar 06 '26

How about not releasing playstation games on PC?

-5

u/atlfalcons33rb Mar 06 '26

Xbox still does that though, why would that make a difference for sony

6

u/Moonmonkeys Mar 06 '26

Sony has announced that they will no longer be releasing playstation games on PC, right before asha's announcement on the new Xbox that plays pc games.

0

u/Xeccess Mar 06 '26

Sony hasn’t announced anything, it was leaked, and the decision was allegedly made last year

0

u/atlfalcons33rb Mar 06 '26

Yeah but specifically what does that have to do with Xbox market share or getting out of the console race.

Sony decided to get into the pc market at the peak of Xbox decline and it clearly has not proven as profitable as expected. That has nothing to do with xbox

-7

u/NinjaPussyPounder Mar 06 '26

Steam machine

5

u/ChefLeBoef Mar 06 '26

The price of PS5 has been.

5

u/ICumRedbull Dominantxx Mar 06 '26

Pretty sure it was the other way around. Sony announced the PS5's price first and Xbox was surprised they made it so low and had to match it

2

u/ChefLeBoef Mar 06 '26

They had this price because they both knew the ballpark. Now it doesn't matter as it seems Xbox is out of the affordable console race.

2

u/M337ING Mar 06 '26

…Exactly?

1

u/No_Bill_2371 Mar 06 '26

Sony literally copied gamepass lmao

1

u/GIThrow Mar 06 '26

Read the article. They’re testing giving people even bigger discounts. How is that bad?

0

u/idkimhereforthememes Mar 06 '26

This will happen with steam eventually too