Market research firm Circana has had a look at US console hardware this year and come away with a grim line: the market is in its most precarious position since the early 80s. For those keeping count, that's the stretch that includes the crash that nearly killed home consoles entirely.
The numbers
These are year-to-date figures through August 2026, shared by Circana on October 10. Xbox hardware units are down 33% on the year, an all-time low for the platform in the US. PlayStation is down 25%, its weakest showing since 2013. Neither of those is a rounding error.
The reason isn't a mystery, and it isn't that people stopped liking games. It's the price. Circana's senior director Mat Piscatella put it plainly:
"Both prices are at all-time US highs. Price sensitivity is becoming a real problem."
The average Xbox now goes for $529, up 26% year over year. The average PlayStation is $597, up 20%. When a console costs the better part of $600 before you've bought a single game, a lot of people simply wait.
Why it keeps getting worse
Circana points the finger largely at component shortages, driven by the AI data-centre building spree hoovering up memory and chips. That pushes manufacturing costs up, and those costs land on the price sticker rather than getting absorbed. So this isn't really a "gamers lost interest" story. It's a "the hardware got too expensive" story, and until the component crunch eases there's no obvious reason for the trend to turn around on its own.
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