Price Hikes Drag PlayStation to Lowest May Sales Since 2000

PlayStation 5 hardware sales in the United States fell 58% year on year in May 2026, sinking to their lowest May total since 2000, according to retail figures from the tracking firm Circana. PlayStation last sold hardware this thinly in a May when Sony was still moving the original console and the PS2 had not yet reached the West.

The cause was no mystery. Sony raised PS5 prices on April 2, 2026, pushing the standard console up $100 to $649.99 and the PS5 Pro up $150 to $899.99, its second increase in under a year, which the company blamed on broad economic pressures. May was the first full month US shoppers faced the new sticker, and many balked.

Xbox landed in the record books too. Its US hardware unit sales were the lowest ever recorded for a May, down 12% from a year earlier.

A trade-off between units and dollars

And yet the US market grew. Total video game spending rose 3% year on year to $4.2 billion in May 2026, while hardware spending climbed 38% to $249 million. The driver was the same force that thinned unit counts: price. Circana, which tracks consoles actually bought at US retail rather than shipped to stores, put the average price paid for a new piece of gaming hardware at $502 in May, up 14% from $440 a year earlier. The average PS5 went for $672, up 33%; the average Xbox Series console for $524, up 22%.

That split — fewer boxes, more money per box — produced an odd outcome for Microsoft. Even as Xbox units fell, its hardware spending rose 7%, because each console it sold carried far more revenue. Circana’s Mat Piscatella told Kotaku that Xbox is “tracking a distant third in hardware sales among the major manufacturers,” but is “getting more revenue from each unit sold, enough to make dollar sales grow in May despite the unit drop.”

Sony got no such cushion. PS5 spending fell 43% even at the higher price, a sign the April increase cost far more in lost sales than it recovered per console. Year to date, US spending is still running 4% ahead of 2025 at $23.0 billion, so a few brutal hardware months have not yet dented the annual total. What they have changed is the shape of the market: buyers are concentrating around the cheapest box on the shelf while the premium consoles stall.

Nintendo is holding the market up

The one platform holder selling into a tailwind is Nintendo. The Switch 2 was the best-selling hardware platform in the US in both units and dollars in May and across 2026 so far, with the PS5 in second. Circana estimates it has reached 5.9 million US units in its first 12 months, the second-fastest-selling piece of gaming hardware in the country since the firm began tracking in 1995, behind only the Game Boy Advance.

The difference is timing. Nintendo has not raised the Switch 2’s price yet; the increase it announced does not take effect until September 1, 2026. For now it is the cheapest new console on shelves, and it is carrying the market. Strip it out, and US hardware spending would have shrunk rather than grown. Software held up across platforms: 007 First Light was May’s best-selling game and already the fourth best-selling title of 2026, with the biggest launch-month sales of any James Bond game on record.

What happens next

The squeeze is not letting up. Microsoft will raise Xbox prices again on August 1, 2026, adding $100 to 512GB models and $150 to 1TB models while discontinuing the 2TB Series X. It pointed to console storage and memory costs, which it says have risen more than 2.5 times and could double again by late 2027, part of the broader component crunch now squeezing the whole console business. All three platform holders have now raised console prices within roughly a year of one another, reversing the decades-old pattern in which hardware gets cheaper as a generation ages.

For PlayStation, the rebound is pinned to a single release. GTA 6, due on PS5 and Xbox in November 2026, is the catalyst the industry expects to pull buyers back even at $649.99. Until it arrives, the monthly US charts are set to keep printing record lows. Where Microsoft’s hardware goes after this generation is the longer question, and the rumored Xbox Series X25 is where that answer starts to take shape.