A $500 PS5 Is Now Inevitable, But For Which Model?

This week on Wednesday, Sony will have a PS5 event where everyone believes they will finally debut the price and release date of the console’s two models, the disc-based one and the digital alternative.

This comes in the wake of Microsoft’s own prices leaking out for the Xbox Series S and Series X, which they were forced to confirm when they originally planned to do an actual event this week instead. The lower spec Series S will cost just $300 while the Series X will cost $500. Generally speaking, this is lower than many predicted either would be, and puts Sony in an interesting, possibly tough position.

In the wake of the Xbox price debut, some have said that Sony rapidly changed their plans to lower the price of the PS5 to match. It always felt like one company was waiting for the other to go first so they could match or undercut them and now that’s what Sony gets to do, if they can afford it.

One thing is clear. It’s almost certain that one PS5 model is going to cost $500. But which model? And if that’s the case, what will the other one cost?

Here are the options as I see them:

$400 Digital/$500 Disc – This is the “leaked” pair of prices I’ve seen floating around, though I have not seen any firm sources that I would believe, unlike the Xbox leaks before. A $400 digital PS5 priced between the Series S and X would probably be a pretty huge win for Sony, as I expect digital sales to continue to skyrocket this coming generation, and most consumers to be comfortable with a digital only console at this point (the Series S is also digital).

$450 Digital/$500 Disc – I have said previously that the disc drive should really only be a $50 difference. That was the difference between the disc and digital Xbox One S this past generation, so we’ve already seen this in action. A disc drive should not cost a full $100, so removing that alone would not be responsible for the price difference, and a full $100 gap would be Sony simply discounting it above and beyond what those parts cost.

$500 Digital/$550 Disc – This would at least match the price of the Xbox Series X for the digital version, which I would not rule out, as Sony has always been hinting this PlayStation isn’t necessarily going to be cheap. A disc drive would be a $50 “luxury” option, but the perception would be that effectively, the PS5 and Series X cost the same.

$500 Digital/$600 Disc – Here’s the $100 gap in the other direction. Like I’ve always said, I never could envision either console going to $600, and I still don’t find this likely even for the more expensive disc PS5. If this were the case the digital version would dramatically outsell the disc one, though I imagine it will in any of these scenarios.

As you can see, all of those options contain a price point at $500 for one console or another, so at the very least Sony can say it has an option to “match” the Series X. There’s no way at all they can get down to $300 for the digital PS5 to match the Series S because they don’t have a model that’s trading power in any capacity, only the disc drive. But I don’t think that will hurt them much in the long run, and the Series S was always kind of a risky experiment on Microsoft’s end (though one that could pan out, who knows). My guess is that Sony undercuts Microsoft with a sub-$500 price for the digital PS5, once again claiming a price edge this generation, even if it ends up only being $50. We’ll know more on Wednesday. Or maybe we won’t, and we’ll be waiting until November before Sony actually debuts the price.