Can’t afford the PS5 Pro? Sony is selling refurbished PS5s for half its price

By Carli Velocci September 11, 2024

A standard white PS5 sitting near some small plants in a home entertainment center. — Digital Trends

While people across the internet are reeling over the PlayStation 5 Pro’s $700 price tag, the company has announced it’ll start selling used PlayStation 5 consoles at a discount.

Sony has a new “PlayStation 5 Certified Refurbished” program on its PlayStation Direct store that offers consoles and DualSense controllers for less than their launch prices. Multiple colors of the DualSense will sell for $60, the regular PS5 for $400, and the PS5 Digital Edition for $350.

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For reference, the PS5 launched in 2020 for $500, while the Digital Edition cost $400. The DualSense cost $70. So these aren’t gigantic discounts. We also don’t know when the products will start shipping through the refurbished program; the Direct site just says “coming soon.” We’ll update this article when we learn more.

Plus, to reiterate, these are used consoles, but Sony uses the term “refurbished” because, as the store page states: “Every PlayStation certified refurbished product completes a rigorous recertification process that includes full testing that meets the same functional standards as new PlayStation products.”

This means that whatever you buy should work as new and have everything that would typically be included in the box, even if it might come with a couple scuffs. Each refurbished product also comes with a one-year limited warranty, so you can contact PlayStation support and return it if you run into any problems (outside you destroying it yourself, of course).

This might be a deal worth considering for those who haven’t purchased a PS5 yet and were turned off by the higher prices for new consoles currently on the market. In 2022, Sony said that it would be raising the price of the consoles due in part to “high global inflation rates.” It didn’t introduce price hikes in the U.S., but with the introduction of the PlayStation 5’s sleeker redesign, it did raise the cost of the digital edition — from $400 to $450. While the regular PS5 Slim still cost $500, it came with a detachable disc drive. The base PS5 you can soon grab refurbished is a safe way to get a console with an included disc drive.

Sony also recently made DualSense controllers more expensive, raising the price from $70 to $75 for the standard model.

Topics

Contributor, Games

Carli is a technology, culture, and games editor and journalist. They were the Gaming Lead and Copy Chief at Windows Central…

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