www.ign.com
Ah yes. Your thoughts?
"Lack of competition" has nothing to do with the pricing. It has more powerful and newer hardware, so it's more expensive than base PS5.
We're also in a context where the components kept increasing its price during the generation, instead of what happened in previous generations, which was to decrease over time. At the same time there has been a huge inflation and the currency exchange also did hurt them. So couldn't price cut of the console, and instead had to increase it. The western economy and geopolitics are fucked and there's a lot of uncerinity for the near future, an upcoming collapse is pretty possible or at least is very likely that inflation and costs will continue growing.
So considering all this, they can't afford to put a cheap price, or to don't a lot of money per console sold. On top of this, after 50 years of gaming market revenue growing there have been a couple of years where revenue kept flat. Meaning, the gaming market may have peaked, which means that going forward could decrease, while the costs of making hardware and games continues increasing. So big companies have to focus on growing revenue, cutting costs to increase their profitability as much as possible to face possible challenges of the future.
Meaning, it makes sense to price the hardware a big more expensive than what the other consoles had when inflation adjusted.