Yes, there is a big and rising inflation, the costs of the materials, electricity and fuel rising, which is making the cost of producing and shipping everything more expensive. Adding that to bigger, more complex products obviously makes them more expensive. We're seeing prices rising everywhere.
But well, I assume people will continue blaming Jim Ryan for this.
I understand the use of very expensive GPUs/PCs in a profesional environment like gamedevs, video streaming/editing, animation, architecture, etc. but not for gaming consumers.
I think to get some extra fps, resolution or some small extra visual improvement isn't worth to pay hundreds or thousands of bucks when you can get basically the same for way less money.
And looking at the Steam stats I'm not the only one: only a tiny portion of Steam users have high end PCs.
Fuel, electricity, components, smartphones, GPUs, Meta Quest, food and pretty much everything is rising prices. It has nothing to do with Sony. If companies want to keep a profitable business, unless they were selling their products with a big profit margin and are having a big profit for the company (like Nintendo) they will have to rise pricing.
In fact, the price rise we saw in PS5 is pretty small compared with many other ones we saw these recent months. And we'll continue to see more.