Sony is already testing it in the PS Store

Since November 2025, Sony is carrying out in relative silence an experiment with the final prices of your games– Different users see different prices for the same game on the PlayStation Store. What started with 50 titles in 30 regions now covers more than 150 games in 68 countries. At the moment, the company continues to say nothing on the subject.

Crazy prices. The first sign came when a Reddit user He noticed that his wife saw a lower price than his for the same game on the PlayStation Store. The gap was too large to be a rounding error by region. No one knew if it was a technical failure or something deliberate, until Pspricesa website that monitors PlayStation Store price history in more than 50 regions, found the answer in Sony’s own infrastructure: identifiers embedded in the store’s API responses, with labels like IPT_PILOT and IPT_OPR_TESTING. We are facing a controlled test.

How testing works. Sony randomly assigns users to a control group or a test group. Those in the test group see different prices. According to the data collected by the site, all experimental prices detected so far are lower than the official price, with discounts ranging between 5.3% and 17.6%. ‘WWE 2K25’ is listed at €61.82 for some compared to the standard €74.99. ‘God of War Ragnarök’ and ‘Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’ drop from €79.99 to €69.99 for certain users. ‘Astro Bot’, from €69.99 to €61.16. There are extreme cases like ‘Helldivers 2’, which reached a 56% discount. What Sony measures is the price elasticity of demand: to what extent price determines the purchase decision of each user profile.

Evolution of the experiment. The program began in November 2025 with about 50 games in approximately 30 regions. Three months later, according to Psprices data, it covers more than 150 titles in 68 regions including Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Africa. The expansion itself is already a sign that the test is yielding data that interests Sony, and it is striking that the company has included its own AAA franchises in the experiment, such as the aforementioned games. It means that Sony considers it necessary to measure price sensitivity even in games where demand seemed guaranteed. Two territories (the United States and Japan) are outside the experiment, and the possible cause is stricter regulation and greater market sensitivity in both countries.

Why now. A look at Sony’s financial context may shed some light on why this decision has been made. According to the company financial report Through December 2025, PS5 shipments fell 15.7% year-over-year in the Christmas quarter, with hardware revenue down 15.1%. CFO Lin Tao spoke of “monetizing the console installed base” as a priority. With 80% of software sales already in digital format, it is important to find a way to boost PlayStation Store sales.

That store also operates without the competitive pressures of PC (market that Sony seems to be abandoning), where the user can buy the same game at different prices on Steam, GOG or many other stores. On PlayStation, the ecosystem is closed: there are no authorized third-party distributors, there are no game codes in physical stores as is the case with Xbox and Nintendo. If Sony controls the discounts and customizes them per user, whoever wants that game on PS5 only has one way to access it.

The terror of dynamic pricing. To the user These types of policies do not suit him well. Airlines, hotels, vacation rental platforms or mobility services like Uber adjust rates in real time according to demand, time or area. The controversy has reached the world of concert tickets, with demands included. In video games, there is also an extra issue: on a plane, a hotel or a concert venue there is a real limitation on the tickets that can be sold. The inventory of a digital game is, by definition, unlimited. What Sony is going to do is called in economics “first degree price discrimination“and that is what has generated the main user complaints.

Although there are no official statements about Sony’s plans, the truth is that the company, for the moment, has not raised prices above the official RRP, but rather has offered discounts based on various criteria that have not yet been revealed. Some bets: Users with less purchasing history could receive greater incentives to encourage them to spend. Thus, the question remains whether we are dealing with a discount for those who do not usually buy or a premium for those who usually do. If the promotion escalates, we’ll eventually find out.

In Xataka | Playstation 6: all the information we know (or think we know) so far