In early October GameStop, America’s largest video game retailer, began selling used PlayStation 5 Pro consoles for $1 399.99, and for $1 499.99 if it had a disc drive. A brand-new PlayStation 5 Pro (PS5 Pro) costs $899.99. A leaked staff memo told employees the markup “is intentional”.

A games console normally loses value the moment it leaves the shop, the way a car does. But this one has doubled its 2024 launch price, second-hand, and other big retailers have matched GameStop’s numbers. Nobody pays more for a used machine unless it offers something the new one does not.

A games console is a sealed computer. Sony sells the hardware cheaply and makes its money on the games, so the machine is locked to run only what Sony approves. In the first week of October, that lock broke. Hackers published a way of breaking the lock in the console’s own software, one that works on any PS5 running system versions 7.00 to 13.60, which covers most of the consoles out there.

Breaking a console's locks used to take volunteers years of picking apart its code. AI coding tools, programs that read and write computer code when you ask them to, now do that work in days. Within a week of the break, hobbyists had Sony’s machine playing old Nintendo and Xbox games, something Sony has never allowed.

This is why a used machine beats a new one. A new console connects to the internet and immediately updates itself, closing the hole. A used console that has old software can still be unlocked, and stays unlocked. So buyers are hunting for second-hand machines by software version, and that rush has pushed the right used machines to $1 500 at big retailers.

The unlocking is one part of a bigger change. The same artificial intelligence (AI) tools now let ordinary people change the games they own. With free kits such as Universal Modder, released on 30 September, you describe what you want in plain English, and the AI reads the game’s code, makes the change, and tests that it works. For the past month social media has been full of the results: skateboarding added to a war game, one famous game running inside another.

This has now reached the games Sony cares about most: the big titles you can only play on a PlayStation, which are the reason people buy the console at all. A tool called AnyPS5 turns those games into ordinary Windows programs, and one of them already runs smoothly on a mid-range PC. The tools refuse to touch pirated copies: they only work on games you own. So everyone who wants to try this is out buying games and machines to experiment on, and that demand is what is pushing second-hand prices up.

For 20 years the games industry has moved customers away from owning anything. You no longer buy a game on a disc; you buy a licence to play it, on a sealed machine, through an online store that can take it away. AI has pushed the other way. The things you actually own, a disc, a downloaded copy, an unlocked machine, are suddenly far more useful than the things you merely rent. The $1 500 console is the market putting a number on that difference.

The industry's first answer has been lawyers: takedown notices for the boldest projects, and software updates from Sony that cannot reach machines kept offline. Sony should know how this ends. In 1984 Sony itself beat the Hollywood studios in the United States Supreme Court, winning ordinary people the right to record television at home on their video machines. Home recording did not kill the studios; within 10 years it was their biggest source of income. The game companies that do well this time will be the ones that sell tools to the tinkerers instead of suing them: official modding kits, marketplaces where creations are sold under licence, and a cut of the sales.

A console bought in 2024 for $699 now sells for $1 500 because its owner can do things with it that its maker never intended.