PS5 price hike shows Japan's a low priority for Sony | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

All the way back in 2016, with the PS4 ramping up into a massive sales success, Sony carried out a fairly major organisational shake-up of its games-related businesses.

Operationally, the biggest change was bringing everything PlayStation-related under one roof – up until that point, there had been a distinct business unit called "Sony Network Entertainment" running services like PlayStation Plus, as well as powerful and unusually autonomous regional units of Sony Computer Entertainment, all of which was merged into a single new management structure.

The most eye-catching aspect of the change, though, was where that new management structure, Sony Interactive Entertainment, was to be headquartered – not in Tokyo, but in California's Bay Area.

This shift wasn't all that meaningful in real terms – it was an acknowledgement of PlayStation's contemporary reality as a major international business with studios all over the world and deep ties to California's tech and entertainment industries, not a coup or a power-grab.

Nothing really changed all that much because PlayStation now had a home address in San Mateo rather than Shinagawa. Still, though, it definitely felt like a cultural shift to many of the platform's fans – and for those fans in Japan, it was something of a bitter pill. Not unexpected by any means – Japanese gamers had long lamented that their days of being "first among equals" in PlayStation's global consumer base were long past – but a little tough to swallow nonetheless.

There's probably a little of that bitter aftertaste back in a few mouths in Japan this week, with Sony announcing that it's hiking the prices of all of its PS5 hardware – not just the console, but controllers and PSVR2 headsets as well – by quite a considerable sum. The PS5 console itself rises ¥13,000 (about $90 / €80) to ¥79,980 (roughly $550 / €500) for the disc drive model. The new prices take effect on September 2nd.

Unsurprisingly, there's nowhere that actually has stock to sell at the old