GameStop Wants $1,400 for a Used PS5 Pro Now

Somewhere in a GameStop back office this week, someone wrote the word "intentional" into a memo and should perhaps have paused before hitting send, because what they were describing was a company charging more for a used console than for a new one and calling it policy rather than opportunism. According to a leaked internal message first reported on Reddit and covered by GameSpot, GameStop has started listing pre-owned PlayStation 5 Pro consoles for as much as $1,400, with $1,330 reserved for the loyalty of GameStop Pro members. That memo's authenticity has not been officially confirmed by GameStop, so treat the word "intentional" as a leak rather than a company statement, but the prices themselves are sitting on GameStop's own storefront for anyone to verify.

The arithmetic is the insulting part. Sony's suggested retail price for a new PS5 Pro is $900, itself already raised from the $700 the console launched at in November 2024, a jump the company made official in April alongside price increases on the standard PS5 and PlayStation Portal. GameStop's used markup sits roughly $500 above that retail figure, which it can get away with for one simple reason: memory shortages have made new PS5 Pro stock close to theoretical, and a scarce object priced below what people will actually pay for it is, to a certain kind of retailer, an invitation rather than a ceiling. The DreamcastGuy channel's coverage of the leaked memo frames the moment as a kind of nostalgia trigger, recalling how a $700 PS5 Pro once seemed like the outrage ceiling. One does miss the simplicity of being merely annoyed at seven hundred dollars.

GameStop is not inventing the practice so much as formalizing it. Similar asking prices for used PS5 Pro units already sit on Amazon and Best Buy, including a listing from third-party seller RYTEK at the latter, but those are independent sellers riding a scarce market, not the retailer's own storefront putting its name on the number. That distinction matters: a marketplace full of opportunists is one thing, a chain store deciding this is simply the price is another, and it tells you something about where GameStop expects demand to sit that it is willing to be the name attached to the sticker.

None of this happens in isolation, either. Xbox raised prices across its own lineup in August, leaving the Series S, long marketed as the budget entry point into the generation, starting at $500. A generation that was supposed to get console gaming cheaper over time is instead the first in memory to move reliably upward, largely on the back of chip supply strained by demand from AI hardware, and GameStop's $1,400 used PS5 Pro reads less like an anomaly than a rehearsal. If a $1,000 PS6 sounds absurd to you today, you were, I suspect, also once told $700 was the ceiling.