The Supreme Court killed the legal basis for one major U.S. tariff regime on Feb. 20, 2026. Console prices kept going up anyway.
In its February ruling, the court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. That invalidated the IEEPA duties that had dominated the trade story through 2025.
It did not end tariffs altogether. Four days later, the White House imposed a temporary 10% Section 122 import surcharge, and in July the U.S. Trade Representative imposed new Section 301 tariffs of 10% or 12.5% on products from 60 trading partners, subject to exemptions. The Section 122 measure ran from Feb. 24 through July 24, while the Section 301 action replaced part of that trade wall.
That distinction matters. The clean argument is not that tariffs disappeared. It is that tariffs alone no longer explain what has happened to console prices.
Since the Feb. 20 ruling, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have each announced another U.S. hardware increase.
The Xbox Series S Is Up 67% From Launch
Measured against original U.S. launch prices, the current picture is hard to miss.
- Xbox Series X, 1TB disc: $499.99 at launch → $799.99 after Microsoft's August increase. About 60% higher.
- Xbox Series S, 512GB: $299.99 at launch → $499.99 . About 67% higher.
- PS5 with disc drive: $499.99 at launch → $649.99 since April 2. About 30% higher.
- PS5 Pro: $699.99 at launch → $899.99 . About 29% higher.
- Nintendo Switch 2: $449.99 at launch → $499.99 on Sept. 1 . About 11% higher.
Microsoft's original launch announcement put the Series X at $499 and Series S at $299. Sony launched the PS5 disc model at $499.99, while PS5 Pro debuted at $699.99. Nintendo launched Switch 2 in June 2025 at $449.99. Xbox's launch pricing PS5's launch pricing PS5 Pro's launch pricing Switch 2's launch pricing
The most striking number remains the Series S. Microsoft's entry-level current-generation Xbox will soon cost as much as a launch-day Series X did in 2020.
[LINK: Player.One's running console pricing tracker]
Microsoft Is Blaming Memory Directly
Microsoft no longer needs anyone to infer why its consoles are getting more expensive.
In its June 25 Xbox Wire announcement, Microsoft said storage and memory prices had increased "more than 2.5x" and predicted another doubling by fall 2027.
The company then announced another increase effective Aug. 1: $100 more for its 512GB consoles and $150 more for 1TB models. Microsoft also said it was discontinuing its 2TB Xbox model.
That explanation is unusually specific.
The Xbox Series S contains 10GB of GDDR6 memory, according to Microsoft's own specifications, while the Series X carries 16GB. That does not mean memory accounts for every dollar of the increase, but it does establish why a memory shortage can hit even the supposedly inexpensive console hardest. Xbox Series S specifications
[LINK: Player.One explainer on the memory shortage hitting consoles and PCs]
Nintendo Says Tariffs And Memory Are Both Costing It Money
Nintendo makes the tariff story more complicated, not less.
At its May 8 financial results briefing, President Shuntaro Furukawa said Nintendo's forecast incorporates roughly ¥100 billion in higher costs from rising components, particularly memory chips, combined with tariffs.
Nintendo was also explicit that its Switch 2 increase was not caused by one factor.
Furukawa pointed to rising memory and component prices, foreign exchange movements and oil prices as pressures expected to continue over the medium to long term. Nintendo said keeping the old hardware price would put significant pressure on profitability. Nintendo's English investor Q&A
That is much stronger evidence than describing the Switch 2 increase as either a tariff hike or a memory hike.
It is both, plus other costs.
Nintendo's U.S. Switch 2 price rises from $449.99 to $499.99 on Sept. 1. Nintendo's official U.S. price announcement
AI Demand Is Squeezing Consumer Memory
The component-market data backs Microsoft's explanation.
TrendForce's third-quarter memory forecast projects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise another 13% to 18% quarter over quarter, with NAND Flash up 10% to 15%.
More importantly for gaming hardware, TrendForce says memory suppliers continue reallocating production toward server applications. It specifically reports constrained graphics-memory supply and says GDDR6 and GDDR7 pricing is rising alongside the broader DRAM market.
The trend began well before this quarter. TrendForce said earlier this year that suppliers were shifting capacity toward HBM and server products while limited GDDR allocation squeezed notebooks and gaming devices. TrendForce's second-quarter analysis
That is a cleaner way to connect AI spending to console prices than saying consoles directly compete with an AI rack for exactly the same memory.
They do not use identical memory configurations. They do compete inside a memory industry where manufacturers are prioritizing higher-margin server and AI demand.
Sony Is The Least Specific
Sony raised the U.S. PS5 disc model to $649.99 and PS5 Pro to $899.99 effective April 2.
Its explanation was deliberately broad.
Sony's March 27 PlayStation Blog post cited "continued pressures in the global economic landscape" without breaking those pressures into tariffs, memory, manufacturing or currency costs.
That leaves less to analyze than Microsoft's or Nintendo's disclosures.
It also means the article should not claim Sony blamed tariffs directly. Sony didn't.
Tariffs Still Matter, But They Are No Longer The Whole Story
The strongest counterargument to this analysis is straightforward: the Supreme Court ruling did not produce a tariff-free market.
The administration replaced the IEEPA system quickly. Section 122 imposed a temporary 10% charge beginning Feb. 24, and USTR's Section 301 duties took effect as the Section 122 window expired in July.
Nintendo explicitly says tariffs remain part of its cost calculation.
There is also a lag between procurement pressure and a retail price change. A console increase announced in summer can reflect component contracts and inventory decisions made months earlier.
So the Feb. 20 ruling cannot be treated like an economic reset button.
But Microsoft's disclosure still changes the argument. When the company increasing Xbox prices says storage and memory costs have risen more than 2.5 times, and independent memory-market data shows AI-driven capacity shifts tightening consumer supply, tariffs are no longer the only convincing explanation.
September 1 Is The Next Price Checkpoint
The question now is what happens when memory pricing eventually cools.
TrendForce says the rate of increase is moderating as consumer buyers hit affordability limits. That is different from memory becoming cheap again, and its more recent outlook still expects DRAM supply to remain tight into 2027.
If memory costs eventually flatten or decline while console MSRPs remain where they are, the argument changes. These increases begin to look less like temporary cost recovery and more like a permanent reset of what console makers believe buyers will pay.
The next change is already dated.
On Sept. 1, Switch 2 moves from $449.99 to $499.99 in the U.S. That should also be the next update to Player.One's console-pricing tracker, because the most useful version of this story is not a one-off argument. It is a running record of whether any of these prices ever comes back down.
