OPINION: Prices rises for Xbox & Playstation… good news for the cycling industry?

“The cycling industry is competing with Playstation, not Volkswagen”.

That’s a line we’ve heard a few times and it is – of course – both correct and incorrect. It cuts right to the heart of one of those central points about the industry. Cycling is something you do in your leisure time, or cycling is something you do to get around instead of driving. For some individuals, it’s a bit of both, but the UK’s industry has typically skewed more to the leisure side…

So with that in mind, the cycling industry’s competition – Playstation, Xbox, iPads, etc – is undergoing some significant challenges, namely price rises.

As reported by the BBC, Apple is raising the prices of MacBooks and iPads worldwide, Microsoft has announced higher prices for Xbox (up £75, coming after a rise in October last year) and Playstation 5 increased by £90 last month.

What’s to blame? AI of course – and the subsequent demand on chips. Those rises are apparently too much for those mega companies to swallow and they’re being passed onto consumers.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the price of bicycles and whether they put off consumers, placing bikes out of reach of your average consumer. It’s a tricky discussion to have. Basic data in the UK cycling industry, for example, is still pretty thin on the ground with most of us unsure of the average price of a bicycle sold. You might know the average price of a bike you sell, but how about through Halfords, which claims to sell half of the nation’s bikes? That discussion aside, there’s some solace here that bike prices may well be going up, but so is that of its leisure-based competition – Xbox, Playstation, etc.

Meanwhile, on the sidelines, technology is under the spotlight again, with the UK’s social media ban for children (following Australia’s) raising the discussion of how technology impacts on us. Cycling hasn’t escaped these kinds of enquiries; eBikes have been hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons but here the reaction of the industries has been markedly different. Cycling has responded to concerns, with the likes of the EBike Positive initiative, while the social media giants have largely washed their hands and subsequently seen legislation on the way to impact them where it hurts (their bottom line).

Drawing this rambling editorial to a close, there’s probably little to be gained by placing cycling against video games/technology, but the wider context of price rises affecting numerous industries – including competitor industries – is worth noting, as is the broader discussion about the potential negative impacts of certain types of technology and how that might play some part in buying decisions, subconsciously or not.