If you were hoping to pick up a second-hand PS5 Pro on the cheap before Grand Theft Auto VI lands next month, I have some bad news for you.
GameStop has quietly bumped the price of a pre-owned PS5 Pro to $1,399.99 in the US, which is a good chunk more than you’d pay for a brand new one if you can actually find it on a shelf. Thanks to scalpers am I right?
The change came to light through an internal GameStop memo that was posted to Reddit on Tuesday and shared by deal-tracking account Nintendeal on X, and Video Games Chronicle has since confirmed that the new listings are showing up on GameStop’s own website, so this isn’t just a rumour doing the rounds.
What the new prices look like
According to the memo, a standard pre-owned PS5 Pro now sits at $1,399.99, while special editions like the 30th Anniversary model and the Wolverine bundle go even higher at $1,499.99, and Retro Handhelds reports that the pricing kicks in fully from 16th October.
For context, a new PS5 Pro currently costs $899.99 after Sony’s own round of price increases, and when the console launched back in November 2024 it was $699, so a used unit at GameStop is now roughly double the original launch price, which is a sentence I never thought I’d be writing about a two-year-old console.
The memo is surprisingly blunt about it too, stating that “the pre-owned consoles will have a higher price than the new console [and] this is intentional”, so nobody at GameStop is pretending this is a typo or a glitch in the system.
Why GameStop is doing this
GameStop hasn’t officially said why, but you don’t need to be a detective to work it out, because GTA VI arrives on 19th November and the PS5 Pro is widely expected to be the best place to play it until the inevitable PC version turns up years down the line.
On top of that, Sony has reportedly been struggling to make enough consoles due to shortages of storage components, and a major retailer has already warned that the combination of those shortages and GTA VI’s launch could leave shelves looking pretty bare over the holidays, so new units are hard to come by right now.
There’s also the eBay factor, because Retro Handhelds notes that PS5 Pros have been selling for around $1,300 on the resale market, and GameStop uses dynamic pricing on pre-owned stock, which lets it charge whatever the market will bear rather than sticking to Sony’s recommended price.
The trade-in side of things
To be fair to GameStop, it isn’t only the selling price that’s gone up, because the memo also lists trade-in values of $800 for a digital PS5 Pro and $850 for the disc version, which is honestly a strong offer if you already own one and fancy cashing out.
But that’s also the whole trick, isn’t it, because GameStop buys your console for $850 and then sells it to the next person for $1,399.99, and the gap between those two numbers is exactly what the retailer is betting on as GTA fever reaches its peak.
What Can We Realistically Do?
I get that GameStop is a business and that supply and demand is a real thing, but there’s something a bit grim about a retailer openly pricing used hardware above the cost of new hardware and putting “this is intentional” in writing, especially when the people most likely to pay it are parents and casual players who only want to play one very big game in November.
If you’re in that boat, my honest advice is to keep checking for new stock at regular retailers, look at a standard PS5 instead, which will run GTA VI perfectly well, and only pay a premium if you absolutely have to, because prices like this tend to collapse the moment supply catches up.
We’ll keep an eye on whether other retailers follow GameStop’s lead in the run-up to launch, and whether Sony says anything about getting more stock out before 19th November.
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