- Sony has been conducting a dynamic pricing experiment on the PlayStation Store
- The system has been running since November 2025 and affects Sony's own first-party games
- Users in certain regions are being offered discounts of up to 27.8%
Sony has been reportedly testing dynamic pricing on the PlayStation Store for months.
That's according to PSPrices, which claims that Sony has been running an A/B testing experiment that shows different prices to different users since November 2025.
In the first four months, the experiment grew from just 50 games in 30 regions to now over 190 games in more than 70 regions.
Sony is allegedly testing the prices for its own first-party titles, like Astro Bot, and launched "a new IPT_LTM program with elastic pricing", which PSPrices said it spotted because it "tracks PlayStation Store prices in more than 50 regions."
"Our system detected unusual offer structures containing experiment identifiers (IPT_PILOT, IPT_OPR_TESTING) in PlayStation API responses," the website explained. "These experimental prices are shown only to certain segments of users selected by Sony."
PlayStation Store users have seemingly been seeing differing prices that are actually lower than the standard retail rates on games like The Last of Us Part 2, God of War, Spider-Man, Helldivers 2, Stellar Blade, and more.
The reports add that "personalized discounts have appeared during sales" offering discounts as high as 12.6% on the aforementioned titles.
Though initially it was thought that the US was exempt from the experiment, as of March, PSPrices claims that "this is no longer true" and discovered Sony had since included PlayStation's largest market.
"In March 2026 we discovered that the US was included in the experiment — and discounts there are significantly deeper than in Europe," it said. "While discounts in Europe are 10–17%, in the US they reach 27.8%."
Some third-party games have also received discounts, including WWE 2K25, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Red Dead Redemption 2, and more.
In addition to regular discounts, during the February PlayStation Store sales PSPrices reports that it found that experiment participants received a different discount compared to regular users, as well.
"For example, Helldivers 2 was sold to regular users at -25%, while experiment participants saw -56%," it said.
Dynamic pricing is a method businesses use to adjust the cost of its products in real time based on demand, and is often seen as a rather unfair practice; the UK Government has previously launched an investigation into Ticketmaster for the same thing.
