Americans are buying fewer consoles than they have in more than a decade, and paying more for each one than ever. Circana’s August 2026 report, released October 8, puts Xbox hardware unit sales in the US down 33% for the year through August. That is the lowest the brand has ever tracked. PlayStation fell 25% over the same eight months and now sits at its weakest point since 2013.
Circana analyst Mat Piscatella went further a day later. In a Bluesky thread, he wrote that the US hardware market hasn’t been “in a more precarious position since the early 80s.” Gamers know what happened then. The North American console business collapsed in the 1983 crash.
What Circana’s August 2026 Report Shows
Circana’s August window ran four weeks, from August 2 to August 29. In that stretch, total US hardware unit sales fell 15% year over year to 559,000. The last August that weak was in 2013, at 423,000 units. That month had an obvious excuse. The PS3 and Xbox 360 were winding down and players were saving for the PS4 and Xbox One, both due that November.
No new generation is around the corner this time. Price is the problem.
Hardware dollar spending slipped only 3%, to $302 million, and that gap tells most of the story. Fewer machines left the shelves, but each one cost more. The average price paid for a new piece of hardware reached $541, an August record that beat the $476 set a year earlier, as GamesBeat’s breakdown of the Circana data shows.
| Platform | August units (YoY) | August hardware dollars (YoY) | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nintendo (Switch 2 + Switch) | -15% | Switch 2: -13% | No. 1 in units and dollars, August and year to date |
| PlayStation | -11% | PS5: +17% | No. 2, lowest August for units since 2013 |
| Xbox | -31% | Xbox Series: -13% | No. 3, lowest August for units since 2020 |
The wider market softened too. Total US spending on games, hardware and accessories fell 9% to $4.26 billion. Piscatella pinned most of that on mobile, which dropped 18%. NBA 2K27 was August’s best-selling game, and accessories were the one category that grew, up 3% to $176 million.
Why PS5 Revenue Rose While Sales Fell
PlayStation’s August looks like a contradiction. Units fell 11%. PS5 hardware dollar sales climbed 17%.
Both can be true because of what a PS5 costs now. Sony’s April 2 price increase moved the standard PS5 to $649.99, the Digital Edition to $599.99 and the PS5 Pro to $899.99 in the US. Sell fewer consoles at prices that high and revenue can still go up, especially when a bigger share of buyers pick the Pro.
GameSpot adds a second reason. The price hikes announced earlier in 2026 set off a rush of people buying before the new prices hit, and that pulled summer demand forward into spring. Six years into the generation, plenty of the people who wanted a PS5 or Xbox Series X|S already own one.
Every Console Maker Raised Prices in 2026
Sony moved first this year, but it had company. Microsoft raised Xbox prices again on August 1, adding $100 to 512GB models and $150 to 1TB models while dropping the 2TB Series X entirely, according to Video Games Chronicle. Nintendo followed on September 1 with its Switch 2 price increase, taking the US model from $449.99 to $499.99. That one lands after Circana’s August window, so September’s report will be the first to show its effect.
| Console | US price now | Latest increase |
|---|---|---|
| PS5 Pro | $899.99 | April 2, 2026 |
| Xbox Series X 1TB Digital | $749.99 | August 1, 2026 |
| PS5 | $649.99 | April 2, 2026 |
| PS5 Digital Edition | $599.99 | April 2, 2026 |
| Xbox Series S 512GB | $499.99 | August 1, 2026 |
| Nintendo Switch 2 | $499.99 | September 1, 2026 |
All three companies blame the same thing. Memory chips and other components have turned scarce and expensive as AI data centers soak up RAM supply, and tariffs have pushed manufacturing costs higher still.
Through August, the average US buyer paid $529 for a new Xbox and $597 for a PlayStation. Circana says both are all-time US highs. Piscatella’s read in the same thread was that price sensitivity has become a real problem, and the unit totals back him up.
How 2026 Got Here, Month by Month
August didn’t come out of nowhere. Circana’s reports have been flashing the same warning since spring.
May was the first big alarm. Xbox posted its worst May for hardware units since Circana started tracking in 1995, and PS5 units fell 58% from a year earlier. PlayStation hadn’t sold that few consoles in a May since 2000. June briefly looked better for Microsoft, with Xbox units up 86%, though that jump came against a soft June 2025 and arrived weeks before the next price increase. Then July snapped back hard: hardware spending dropped 29% to $282 million, the weakest July since 2020, and console units fell 39%.
Nintendo is the one company holding the hardware market up. Switch 2 sold 5.9 million US units in its first 12 months, the second fastest start Circana has ever tracked behind the Game Boy Advance. It led the US market in both units and dollars in August and for 2026 so far, with PS5 in second place on both counts.
Xbox’s Slide Goes Beyond Pricing
Price explains a lot, but it doesn’t explain why Xbox is falling faster than PlayStation. Microsoft has spent the last two years bringing major first-party games to PS5 and PC, which strips away the main reason to own its hardware. Its own US price increases have also been steeper than Sony’s this year.
Physical game sales tell the same story. Circana’s figures, reported by Pure Xbox, show Xbox titles made up just over 4% of new physical game sales in the US through July. Nintendo platforms took 63% and PlayStation 32%.
Microsoft is already looking past this generation. The company has confirmed a next-gen console codenamed Project Helix, and leaks around a Series X25 point to a pricier refresh in the meantime. Xbox revenue was falling well before August, as Microsoft’s FY26 Q3 earnings (January to March 2026) showed.
Can GTA 6 Rescue Holiday Console Sales?
The date the whole industry is circling is November 19, 2026. Grand Theft Auto VI launches that day on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S only, with no PC version confirmed. It’s the single biggest reason anyone might buy a console this year, and we’ve already looked at the GTA 6 reveal’s early impact on UK console sales.
Piscatella said GTA 6 could ease at least some of the declines, but tied that to pricing and product availability. Both worries are fair. Someone buying a $649.99 PS5 and a new copy of GTA 6 is spending far more than a console-plus-big-release purchase cost a few years ago. And if memory shortages cap how many units Sony and Microsoft can build, extra demand won’t turn into extra sales.
Our read: GTA 6 should deliver a strong November and probably PS5’s best hardware month of 2026. It won’t fix the bigger issue. The PS5 now costs $150 more than it did at launch in 2020, and the people who still haven’t bought one are, almost by definition, the most price-sensitive shoppers left.
For players, the lesson of 2026 is that waiting for a price cut hasn’t paid off. Prices have moved in one direction all year. If you plan to buy before GTA 6, retailer bundles are likely to be the closest thing to a deal, and the September Circana report will show whether Nintendo’s $499.99 Switch 2 holds up at its new price.
