PlayStation 6 BOM cost now close to $1,000, raising concerns about the console's launch price

Hardware insider Kepler_L2, who has a solid track record of leaking GPU architecture details, has posted an updated PlayStation 6 bill-of-materials estimate on NeoGAF. According to the update, the BOM now sits at around $960. In March, he had the figure at $760, with a $699 retail price still on the table, with a reasonable subsidy. That window is looking a lot narrower now.

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The BOM (or bill of materials) is simply the cost of components needed to build a single unit. It doesn't include labor, R&D, marketing, or logistics. It is basically the sum total of the hardware cost, and that's not all it takes to build a console. That means $760, or now $960, would just be the starting point for Sony's costs, not the final number.

Sony has almost always sold consoles below cost at launch, making back the margin through game sales and PlayStation Network. That math gets harder as the BOM climbs. Consoles have traditionally been subsidized by only around $100 to $200, which means a $999 launch price is still plausible, but a higher one isn't impossible if costs keep rising before 2027.

The Steam Machine is probably the closest reference point the industry has right now. Valve originally targeted around $750 for the Steam Machine, but the global RAM shortage forced the final price to $1,049 for the base 512GB model, and that's without a controller. We covered how Valve blamed the ongoing DRAM crisis for making its original price goal completely unworkable. Although Valve won't subsidize the Steam Machine with game sales, it looks like the PS6 is staring down the same problem.

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Kepler has also argued that delaying the PS6 would likely make things worse rather than better, since a delay wouldn't result in upgraded specs at this stage, and memory prices show no sign of retreating. Micron's CEO has publicly warned that memory costs won't ease for years, and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma recently confirmed in a blog post that storage costs for their next-gen console have already gone up over 5x compared to two years ago.

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Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki has said the company hasn't made a final call on PS6 pricing or timing. Meanwhile, as we've reported, Sony is reportedly considering cutting the PS6's GDDR7 memory from 30 or 32GB down to 24GB, which would save around $60 per unit by disabling a single memory controller on the AMD SoC.

Every month the BOM climbs, Sony's options get worse. Either the PS6 launches above $1,000, or Sony takes a huge loss that would be difficult to subsidize.