The May 2026 Circana report is out and the numbers are wild in both directions. Nintendo Switch 2 has become the second fastest-selling console in US history, shifting 5.9 million units in its first 12 months on sale — a figure that puts it behind only the Game Boy Advance, which moved 6.5 million units in its first year back in 2001. Meanwhile, PlayStation 5 just recorded its worst May since the year 2000, and Xbox posted what Circana explicitly described as the lowest May sales ever recorded for Xbox hardware. The console market in 2026 is a story of one extraordinary winner and two platforms bleeding out from self-inflicted price wounds.
Switch 2 by the Numbers
To appreciate how impressive Switch 2’s trajectory is, it helps to have some context. The Game Boy Advance — the console it’s chasing for the all-time record — launched in June 2001 and rode a wave of massive handheld gaming demand at a time when Nintendo had near-total dominance of the portable market. For Switch 2 to come within 600,000 units of that 25-year-old record in its first 12 months, while launching into a gaming market with smartphones, Game Pass, and every other competing entertainment option that didn’t exist in 2001, is genuinely remarkable.
Switch 2 was May’s best-selling console in the US, ahead of PS5. It’s also the single biggest reason why year-on-year hardware spending in the US rose by more than a third in May despite PS5 and Xbox sales declining. Take Switch 2 out of the equation and the overall hardware market would have looked catastrophic. Nintendo is essentially carrying the entire US console industry’s revenue numbers right now.
Nintendo has also confirmed it will raise Switch 2 prices later in 2026, which is the one cloud over what is otherwise a remarkable run. Even so, the installed base it has built in its first year gives it a cushion that PS5 and Xbox don’t have heading into the back half of the year.
PlayStation 5’s Worst May Since 2000
For PS5, the May report is genuinely grim. Sales were down 58 percent year-on-year, which Circana attributed directly to Sony’s recent price increases. The PS5 standard disc model now retails at $649.99, up significantly from where it was a year ago, and the average price paid for a PS5 unit in May 2026 hit $672 — a 33 percent increase compared to the same month last year. The result is that PS5 recorded its lowest May unit sales total since 2000.
Let that land for a second. The year 2000 was before the PS2 launched. Sony’s current-generation console just had a May that performed worse than a month when the PlayStation 2 didn’t exist yet. That is not a number anyone at Sony will be pleased about.
Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki has previously stated that the company secured enough PS5 units to last through the 2026 calendar year — the supply is there. The problem is demand collapsing at the higher price point, not units being unavailable. That distinction matters for how Sony can respond: this isn’t a supply chain fix, it’s a demand problem caused by price sensitivity, and the only real lever Sony has is either lowering prices (which component costs make extremely difficult) or waiting for GTA 6 to inject enough demand to move people off the fence despite the higher cost.
Xbox’s Worst May Ever — and It Didn’t Even Get the Bigger Percentage Drop
Xbox’s situation is arguably stranger than PlayStation’s. The platform was only down 12 percent year-on-year in unit sales — which sounds far better than PS5’s 58 percent drop. But Circana still described the actual sales number as the lowest ever recorded for a May month in Xbox history. The reason the percentage drop looks relatively small is because Xbox’s year-ago baseline was already very low. When you’re starting from a weak position and still declining, a small percentage drop can still represent a historic low.
The average price paid for an Xbox Series X|S unit in May 2026 was $524, a 22 percent increase year-on-year. And that was before Microsoft’s latest round of price hikes, which take effect on August 1, 2026, adding another $100 to $150 across Series X and Series S models. The pricing trajectory for Xbox is moving in exactly the wrong direction at exactly the wrong time. Xbox CSO Matthew Ball has already publicly acknowledged that demand for Xbox hardware currently exceeds supply, so the platform is simultaneously supply-constrained and hiking prices — a combination that is very hard to spin positively.
The Broader Picture: Average Console Prices Have Never Been This High
Zoom out from the individual platform stories and the Circana data paints a stark picture of the market as a whole. The average price paid for a new unit of gaming hardware in the US rose to $502 in May 2026, compared to $440 in May 2025. That’s a 14 percent jump in one year, and it’s happening at a time when the cost of living is already squeezing disposable income for most households.
What makes this particularly concerning is that the underlying cause — the RAM and memory shortage driven by AI data center demand — shows no sign of resolving on a short timeline. Micron flagged in late 2025 that consumer memory production was being deprioritised in favour of enterprise AI memory, and nothing has changed that calculus since. Microsoft stated yesterday that it expects “another doubling” in component pricing by autumn 2027. If that projection is accurate, it means every console on the market today could face further price hikes over the next 12 to 18 months — and it means the PS6 and Xbox’s next-generation console, whenever they arrive, will launch into an even more expensive component environment than today’s hardware already faces.
Valve already showed us what that looks like with the Steam Machine launching at $1,049. Even Valve admitted the price was significantly higher than what they originally designed the product around. We’re in uncharted territory: never before in a console generation’s mid-life have prices increased this aggressively after launch. The normal trajectory of console pricing is to decline over time as manufacturing scales up and efficiencies improve. That entire model has broken down.
Can GTA 6 Save the Console Market This Holiday?
The big question hanging over all of this is whether Grand Theft Auto 6, launching November 19, can do what no other game in recent memory has been able to: drive a meaningful wave of new console purchases and reverse the sales decline that PS5 and Xbox are experiencing.
The case for optimism is real. GTA 5 sold over 210 million copies across its lifetime and has never truly stopped selling. GTA 6 is the most anticipated game in over a decade, and a significant portion of the player base that made GTA 5 a cultural phenomenon is still sitting on PS4 or hasn’t bought a current-gen console yet. If even a fraction of those people decide November is finally the time to upgrade, it could be a meaningful demand spike.
The case for pessimism is equally real. Consoles are now $650 to $900 just for the hardware, before buying the game. The economic environment is difficult. One major retailer has already warned that there may not be enough PS5 and Xbox stock to satisfy GTA 6 demand this holiday season, which means even motivated buyers could struggle to find units. And Microsoft’s August 1 price hike makes Xbox an even harder sell heading into the most important commercial period of the year.
GTA 6 will almost certainly give the console market a boost. Whether that boost is enough to fully offset what is shaping up to be a structurally difficult year for PS5 and Xbox is a much harder question to answer.
For more on the current state of console gaming, check out our full breakdown of the PS5 and Xbox shortage warnings ahead of GTA 6’s holiday launch, the PlayStation Store’s 551 movie delistings hitting in September, the leaked LEGO Star Wars Boba Fett set arriving August 1, and the Deltarune Chapter 6 confirmed 2027 release window.
