With another year’s Memorial Day sales right around the corner, we’re looking to the next holiday discount season to hopefully bring some terrific PS5-shaped deals with it.
While not a major sales event at the scale of Black Friday or Prime Day, Memorial Day PS5 deals are a staple every early summer, and it can be a great time to save some cash on both hardware and games. However, there are some discounts we’re really hoping the Memorial Day sales can bring – more so than others.
It’s relatively easy to find savings on games nowadays, for example, but holiday deals events often see bigger cuts on bigger items: hardware, bundles, high-quality, peripherals, and so on. As a result, and because we’ve got our finger on the pulse when it comes to gaming deals, we’ve gathered up some thoughts on what we hope to see make an appearance when it comes to specific Memorial Day PS5 deals.
It’s also reported that Sony might launch its Days of Play sale soon, which could really help out and bring some price cuts. So, with the caveat of this being a ‘minor’ holiday sales period, and the fact that the likes of Prime Day and Black Friday should bring deeper cuts, these are our hopes for PS5 deals this Memorial Day.
PSVR 2 to get a serious price cut
Goodness, how PSVR 2 could do with a win. And considering that win seems unlikely to come from Sony’s support or any new, bombastic games, a serious price cut could be the best thing for the system.
It still (somehow) retails for its wallet-busting $550 / £530 and we have seen barely any discounts on it since it launched in February last year, which has been a bit disappointing. With many balking at its more-than-a-PS5 price, a big price cut could be the thing that’ll tempt prospective buyers in.
Even if it nudges below the $500 mark in the US (or below the £480 mark in the UK), that’d be noteworthy and maybe enough to tempt people to jump in – but we’re really hoping for a bombastic PlayStation VR deal now.
Discounted PS Store cards for PS Plus deals
I was desperately hoping for PS Plus deals last Black Friday, and while we haven’t seen as many dedicated discounts on pre-loaded cards or ‘proper’ PlayStation Plus deals on the sub itself, we did see some action. And I’m hoping we might get a repeat of that this month.
Back in Black Friday we saw Walmart and some other retailers offer 10% discounts on PS Store cards and credit vouchers – this was easily the best way to save money on PS Plus subscriptions and stacks. In the UK earlier this year we also saw 15% off the same cards at Currys so there’s always hope on that side of the Atlantic too.
If the discounted cards is the way to get PS Plus cheap now, then we’ve got our fingers crossed that it’ll happen again this month.
Sub-$50 DualSenses and DualSense Edge price cuts
DualSense controller deals and discounts are not exactly rare, but they are often at their best in holiday sales and across retail events. It’s at these points they are at their most tantalizing and tempting too.
In terms of specific variants, I’m really hoping we see the newer colorways, such as the excellent Cobalt Blue and Volcanic Red, drop in price. However, given the current regional record lows of $49 and £39 for the DualSense we’re not expecting Memorial Day sales to smash through those price points and offer groundbreaking DualSense controller deals as a minor sales event – however handy discounts taking the pads into the $50 / £40 ranges would be most welcome.
This is more out of blind hope than any expectation or insight, but it’s still about time that the Dualsense Edge controller had a price cut. To be frank, I’d be surprised if Memorial Day was the sale that brought such a discount, but, well, here’s hoping. Given it’s rigidly sticking at the $200 / £210 price point, I’d take almost any price cut now, but something of $10 / £10 or more would be welcome – though 10 per cent would really be the point at which folks might get tempted.
PS5 deals and bundles to break new ground
We’ve been steadily seeing better and better PS5 deals and good-value bundles in the past year or so now. The best sign of this being that you can now get a PS5 bundle with a great game for the retail price of the console, and they are readily available.
However, it’d be particularly great if the Memorial Day sales marked the turning point for the console and bundles and we slowly started to see the prices tumble. This is made an even more relevant proposition or line of thought given the PS5 Pro is reportedly only a few months away – new iterations of PlayStation consoles have always brought the price of existing ones down, historically.
In terms of actual pricing, well, you can currently get a PS5 and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 for $449 in the US – if we were to see a Memorial Day PS5 deal that took this to $425 or closer to the $400 mark, it’d surely fly off the shelves. Even if it were a short-lived offer.
2TB PS5 SSDs for $100 / £100 or less
Having seen the best SSDs for PS5 drop to the $100 / £100 mark in a couple of recent sales periods, we’d almost hoped that this would have become normal by now. Sadly that’s not been the case, and 2TB SSDs – despite now being what I think is the new sweet spot for PS5 storage – have stubbornly held their price points in 2024, with no outrageously cheap PS5 SSD deals to be seen in months.
As a result, we’re really hoping that this month’s Memorial Day sales will bring a few 2TB models down to the value-busting price point. My most optimistic hope is that we see something like the Samsung 990 Pro get toward that price level, but we’re most likely still looking at those ones that have been out in the market for a little longer such as the WD Black SN850P, the Samsung 980 Pro and the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX.
