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In November 2024, a PlayStation user noticed something… odd. Logged in, Astro Bot on the PS Store was $44.99. But when they logged out, it was $59.99? They shared it on Reddit. Weird, but maybe just some kind of discount? A year later, another post. Red Dead 2, same region, even the same PlayStation, but two different prices? More of these began to pop up. What was happening? Then, the site PSprices, which tracks PlayStation Store prices, reported that Sony had been secretly experimenting with dynamic pricing. Two users can secretly be given different discounts. Is this even legal?
Unfortunately, this is just the beginning. Sony is trying to squeeze customers for as much as possible, and something far bigger is forcing their hand. But it's not just Sony. A gigantic battle over the very nature of discounts is just beginning. And some are doing much worse than Sony. So, what was actually going on? The team at PSPrices, the platform that tracks the PlayStation Store, noticed something strange. Tension The store's public-facing API started including weird strings. First was "IPT_OPR_TESTING". It was attached to 17 games in 42 regions. Then another: "IPT_PILOT". 139 games across 68 regions, but in particular,
a lot of Sony's own titles. Then another in March: "IPT_LTM". US only, 104 games. What were these? Users were secretly being assigned to control and test groups. You might see a standard price, or an experimental price, depending on the group. So, the user who had a different price from his wife? One would have been a control group and the other a test group. Despite both being in the same region and currency - even the same house. "During the February PlayStation Store sales we found that experiment participants received a different discount percentage than regular
users. For example, HELLDIVERS 2 was sold to regular users at -25%, while experiment participants saw -56%." But it gets even weirder. IPT_LTM, for example - the US one - was testing discounts against each other, with much bigger discounts. The retail price for GTA5 was $39.99. Some users saw a discount to $29.99, others $26.99. So what was going on? People are calling it "Dynamic Pricing". And it's "sort of, but not quite." It's hard to say, but it doesn't seem like it fluctuates enough based on real-time demand to be called "Dynamic Pricing." To be clear: no one was being
charged above retail. Some users were getting bigger discounts than others. What's actually happening is that Sony is testing price elasticity. This is something businesses do to figure out how sensitive you are to price changes. For Sony, using A/B testing, they're trying to figure out how much they need to lower prices to get you to buy. Who will pay full price, and who needs a bit more of a nudge. This sort of pricing already exists. Airlines do this all the time, which is why people frequently pay different amounts for the same ticket.
Amazon and other big retailers also do this, egregiously so. And will send targeted coupons to people based on their shopping behavior or a "welcome back" discount. Though very recently, this is getting a lot worse. But for Sony, this feels different, and unwarranted for video games. There's a "social contract" with a storefront. Everything is uniform. Everyone sees the same discount. That was the promise, unlike with airlines or Amazon. Hiding the discounts feels a bit weird, plus Sony's strong monopoly position over the store basically means you pay what they decide, or nothing at all.
And most of all: price elasticity is also tied to supply. Digital games don't run out. There's no supply. No limited number of plane seats to fill. Plus, what determines what group you're in? Is it random, or something more "tailored," based on behavior? Gamers are, naturally, pretty annoyed at this. More and more posts began popping up. Another user had Assassin's Creed Unity displaying a discounted price of £3.74 when browsed logged out, jumping to £9.99 once they logged into their account. But moderators deleted that one, annoyingly.
The media quickly picked up on it. Push Square reported that "We've been able to replicate this on the browser-based PS Store; when logged in, we see the higher price, and it swaps to the lower one when we're not, just as shown above." "This is absolutely ridiculous and extremely scummy." "Shame on Sony. I'll be buying even less digital games than I already do." Someone shared the PSprices article on Reddit, which got 1,100 comments in four days. But why is this happening now? As it turns out, Sony is caught right in the middle of a huge change, and they're being squeezed.
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AI companies - NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft - are paying premium prices for high-speed memory at a scale that consumer electronics manufacturers simply can't compete with. But they're not really buying the same RAM as Sony; they're trying to get HBM: High Bandwidth Memory. So, what does this have to do with PlayStation? Well, consoles use a particular type of DRAM: GDDR, and because companies are making more HBM to keep up, they aren't prioritizing other kinds of RAM. Micron, the third-largest RAM supplier, has left the consumer market entirely. There's not enough to go around, so prices have gone up a lot.
"DRAM contract prices have been revised upward, from a previous estimate of 55-60% to now 90-95%." So, Sony has a bit of a problem: getting enough RAM. In November 2025, Sony CFO Lin Tao told investors that Sony had secured just enough memory supply to keep PS5 hardware profitable, but only through March 2026. Anything after that wasn't guaranteed. And it gets worse. PlayStation hardware margins are pretty thin. Under 10%. Way more than before, but still low. [Piers Harding-Rolls, Ampere Analysis]: "It is likely that Sony had price protections
for its components for a set period and this may well have come to an end. With no sign of prices easing. Sony will have made the move to protect its slim hardware margins." To be clear: Sony as a whole isn't struggling. Operating profits jumped 22% year-on-year in Q3 FY2025. PlayStation alone brought in around $900 million, up 19%. But things were getting worse, and fast. With this road of uncertainty ahead, it gives context to some decisions. In Sony's Q3 earnings call, February 2026 - right at the end of Sony's RAM supply - CFO Lin Tao said something interesting.
"We intend to minimize the impact of the increased memory cost on this segment going forward by prioritizing monetization of the install base to date and striving to further expand our software and network service revenue." The installed base - aka: the people who already own a PS5. So, what does all this have to do with Sony's pricing experiment? Sony takes a 30% cut from every PS Store purchase, like Apple and Steam, even if it's not their own games. Something which they're currently being sued for. But now they're trying to get their "install base" to buy more, by testing elasticity. Console margins are slim and getting slimmer, so why not extract more from the area with far better margins?
Users are now expecting a price hike to PS Plus, with some threatening to cancel if they do. Others are suggesting buying a year's subscription now before the price jumps. Though… dunno how that sticks it to Sony? On March 27th, 2026. PlayStation Blog. Isabelle Tomatis, VP of Global Marketing. "With continued pressures in the global economic landscape, we've made the decision to increase the prices of PS5, PS5 Pro, and PlayStation Portal remote player globally." PS5 Disc Edition: $549.99 → $649.99. Up $100. PS5 Digital Edition: $499.99 → $599.99. Up $100. PS5 Pro: $749.99 → $899.99. Up $150. Since launch in November 2020, the PS5 Disc Edition has gone from $499.99 to $649.99 - $150 more than
day one. (Lower third: With a $50 increase in August 2025). The PS5 Pro launched at $699.99 in late 2024. It's now $899.99. $200 more in under two years. I didn't realise the PlayStation was an appreciating asset! I thought consoles were supposed to get cheaper, guys. People are now expecting the Switch 2 to also see a price hike. And that's not even mentioning the new digital license controversy. (Highlight: "now require an internet connection once every 30 days to validate the license") The more things change, the more they stay the same. But something is changing.
This type of tailored, opaque pricing from Sony is becoming more common. There's a huge battle waging right now over the very nature of sales and discounts. More and more companies are trying to change the way discounts work altogether. Even worse than Sony, many companies will secretly charge you more. And not at random. Though I'm not talking about dynamic pricing or surge pricing. Where prices change based on general demand, time of day, scarcity - why hotels cost more on the same day as a big sporting event. That's normal. I'm talking about surveillance pricing.
Instacart began using AI price experiments, and a non-profit found that prices differed by up to 23% per item. Target's app will display higher prices on the same products - like $148 more for the same vacuum cleaner. Even weirder, these price changes came when you were inside the store, versus on the far side of the parking lot. Staples will charge you more if you have fewer options - like if you're near a competitor. Delta announced it would start deploying surveillance pricing, though it quickly backpedalled after backlash. Hotel prices in Manhattan jumped by as much as $511 per night when browsing from a Bay Area IP address compared to Phoenix or Kansas City.
Don't even get me started on Amazon. Though this pricing has started a war. This year, lawmakers across the US have introduced more than 70 bills targeting surveillance pricing - travel, grocery, rental markets, and now gaming. On March 5th, 2026, the House Oversight Committee formally launched an investigation into it - sending letters to major platform companies demanding documentation on their pricing algorithms. [Chairman Comer]: "Surveillance pricing can be difficult to detect because consumers rarely have a view into what information a company has about them, what the prices they see are based on, or what prices other customers may be seeing for the same goods or services. Often this takes place in a 'black box'
environment where consumers do not know that personalized pricing is taking place or what information collected about them is driving prices." Maryland just passed the Protection From Predatory Pricing Act - the first law of its kind in the US - banning retailers and delivery services from using personal data to tailor prices. Though it might not be enough. Consumer Reports said it had "too many industry-friendly loopholes, and weak enforcement provisions." But Maryland is just the beginning. Hawaii, California, Illinois, Kentucky, Connecticut - more than a dozen states have bills pending.
Sony's pricing might not be as bad as some of these other cases, based on your income, location, or other private factors. But it's along the same train of thought, and experiments are often the first step of a bigger plan. The worst part of all these pricing strategies is the lack of transparency. In 1970, economist George Akerlof published the paper "Market for Lemons," which won him a Nobel Prize and changed the way we understood the free market. In the used car market, sellers know whether their car is good or a "lemon," but buyers can't tell. So buyers just pay the "average price," instead of more for the good car and less for the bad.
With more information, customers make better purchasing decisions, and better quality products win. But in a "black box," customers lose and spend more for worse products. Currently, Sony is in hot water over another problem as well. They make so much money from the PS Store because they charge 30%, since they hold all the power. But now they're caught in a multi-billion dollar lawsuit, as some think this is an illegal monopoly that has caused prices to be too high. Click this video to learn the rest of the story.
