US Console Sales Hit an All-Time Low for Xbox and a 13-Year Low for PlayStation. I Think It's a Price Problem, Not a Fun Problem

Every so often a sales report lands with one sentence that does more work than the whole spreadsheet. This week's came from Circana's Mat Piscatella, the analyst who tracks what Americans actually buy at retail. He said the US console hardware market hasn't been in a more precarious position "since the early 80s."

Precarious is a strong word from someone whose job is measuring things carefully, so I went looking at the numbers behind it. I'm not going to retype the headline, because every gaming site already has it. What I built for you is my own price-versus-units scoreboard, a check on whether the comparison to the early '80s really holds, and a three-question test for deciding whether now is a sane time to buy a console. One honest note first: I'm working from Circana's figures as relayed by VGC, Hardware Busters, Gaming.net and others, I can't see Circana's full dataset, and wherever I couldn't confirm something, I say so.

What Circana actually said

Here's the confirmed part. Circana's August report came out on October 8, and on October 9 Piscatella followed it with year-to-date figures in a thread on Bluesky. Through August, Xbox hardware unit sales in the US are down 33% from the same stretch last year, which Circana says is an all-time low for the platform. PlayStation units are down 25%, the lowest point since 2013. VGC adds that the drop reflects a significant rise in console prices, driven mostly by component shortages caused by AI data centers.

Two details deserve more attention than they got. First, this is about hardware, not the whole games business. Piscatella's warning was about boxes, not about people losing interest in playing. Second, these are year-to-date numbers through August, so the holiday season and the November release he hinted at aren't in them.

My scoreboard: price up, buyers down

Circana gave us two numbers for each platform: how much more the average buyer paid, and how many fewer units sold. I didn't see anyone put them side by side in the coverage I read, so I did.

My arithmetic, rounded, not Circana's. Implied dollars = (1 + price change) × (1 + unit change) − 1. The bars share one scale, so you can compare them directly.

The two ratios land within a hair of each other, at roughly 1.25 points of lost units for every point of price increase. I wouldn't call that a law of nature. Two data points are a coincidence at best, and Xbox in particular has had stock problems that muddy everything. But the order is consistent: the platform with the bigger price jump took the bigger sales hit.

The implied dollar figures are what I find more interesting. Because everyone who still buys is paying more, the money falls less than the units do. That's the shape I'd expect from a market being priced out, though the data alone can't prove it.

The August twist: fewer boxes, almost the same money

The single month tells the same story more sharply. Total US hardware units fell 15% in August to 559,000, the lowest August since 2013, when the industry moved 423,000 units. But hardware spending fell only 3%, to $302 million. The average price paid for a piece of gaming hardware hit an August record of $541, against $476 a year earlier. By my math that's about 14% more per box, and roughly 100,000 fewer boxes than last August.

Look at PlayStation, because it's the strangest line. Units fell 11% while PS5 dollars rose 17%. By my arithmetic, that means the average PlayStation sold in August cost roughly 30% more than a year earlier. List price increases explain part of that. I can't tell from the public figures how much comes from buyers shifting toward pricier models, so I won't pretend I can.

Nintendo is the surprise at the top. The Switch 2 led in both units and dollars for August and for the year so far. Piscatella told a follower it's doing fine, though he said recent price increases have slowed its momentum. When even the leader is slowing, it suggests the problem isn't one company's strategy. For the price side of that story, I laid out every 2026 console hike in my price ladder.

Is the early-'80s comparison fair?

When Piscatella says "early 80s," he means the North American video game crash. By the most widely cited estimates, home video game revenue fell from about $3.2 billion in 1983 to about $100 million in 1985, a drop of nearly 97%. It ended when Nintendo's NES arrived, in a test market in 1985 and nationwide in 1986. Here's how I'd line the two moments up.

The early '80s was a collapse of trust in the games. Today's squeeze is about the price of the box. Those are different diseases, and the difference matters because people still show up for the games. Total US games spending fell 9% in August, but mobile dropped 18%, console content fell 7%, and PC content actually rose 13%. I read that as players finding other ways to play, not players leaving. So I take Piscatella's line as a warning about the hardware business specifically, not a prediction that games are about to fade.

What GTA 6 can and can't do

Piscatella said the release of what he called the Big Video Game in November might ease at least some of the declines. He didn't name it. Gaming.net reports he avoids naming it because the title tends to draw a wave of unusual activity. I'd bet he means GTA 6, which is due November 19, and Circana's own February forecast says GTA VI has the highest purchase intent it has ever recorded. Here's how I'd split what a launch like that can and can't touch.

• It can lift demand.A game with that much interest can move people who've been waiting on the fence.
• It can't create stock.VGC reports that a retailer told The Game Business a GTA 6 launch will likely sell consoles out. It also reports that Xbox's Matthew Ball said in June that demand for the console exceeds supply.
• It can't lower the price.VGC reported that GameStop raised its price for a pre-owned PS5 Pro by 55% to $1,400, well above the $899.99 list price of a new one.

Piscatella himself tied any relief to availability and pricing. If you want to see how I counted down to the launch, my GTA 6 countdown piece has the details.

My three-question test: should you buy a console now?

This is my own checklist, not Circana's, and it's built for a market where prices are high and the next move is unclear. Answer all three before you spend.

If you answered "yes" to the first, "no" to the second and "yes" to the third, I'd stop reading hardware headlines and go play something. That's it. Everyone else has a reason to wait, and waiting isn't failure.

What the numbers can't tell us

• How much is price and how much is supply.An Xbox executive said in June that demand exceeds supply, so some of the Xbox drop may be boxes that weren't on shelves rather than buyers walking away.
• How much of the price jump is list prices.The average price paid also moves with which models people pick, so it isn't a pure measure of price hikes.
• What happens after August.The figures stop before the November release, so they can't show whether the holidays change the picture.
• The rest of the world.These are US retail numbers only, and I can't see the full methodology beyond what's been published.
• What Microsoft and Sony say.I didn't find a Microsoft or Sony response in the coverage I read.

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