One small studio gave the tariff money back. The big three kept theirs

Twelve dollars and thirty-six cents. That is the exact size of the gesture that this week made a small studio in Portland look better than Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft put together.

Panic, the people behind the yellow crank-powered Playdate, is sending tariff money back to the people who paid it. While the US tariffs were in force the company added a 19 percent surcharge to Playdate orders to cover the import duty it was being charged, and dropped that surcharge in late April. After the US Supreme Court struck the tariff regime down in February, Panic got its own money back from the government - and instead of quietly booking it as revenue, it is refunding customers. CEO Cabel Sasser's explanation fit in one line: it simply is not their money to keep.

Now the other side. Sony has reportedly received around half a billion dollars in tariff refunds. The PS5 price has not moved back down by a single euro. Nintendo, Sony and Amazon are all facing class actions from buyers who worked out that the tariff cost was collected once at the till and a second time from the US Treasury. None of them has voluntarily returned a cent.

We never even had a queue to stand in

This is where it gets bleak. Nobody in this part of Europe ever paid a US import duty on a console - and the prices in euros went up anyway, twice, and stayed up.

The PS5 Digital Edition sits at 599.99 euros after the spring increase. The August round pushed the 512 GB Series S from 349.99 to 499.99, the 1 TB version to 599.99, and the disc-drive Series X to 799.99. That last round was not even blamed on tariffs - Microsoft pointed at memory prices instead. And that is the tell: the justification gets swapped out every eighteen months, the direction of travel never does.

So there is no refund queue for us to join, no class action to sign up to, no blog post on the way. We swallowed the number and carried on.

Which is why the second-hand market has quietly become the sensible option rather than the cheap one. When a boxed new console costs what it costs now, a two-year-old machine with some warranty left is not a compromise, it is arithmetic. Same goes for holding on to a console a full generation longer than you planned - what used to look like being skint now just looks like reading the room correctly.

I do not want to over-romanticise Panic here. It is a small company, the total sum is trivial next to a Sony quarterly report, and the goodwill they bought with this is worth more than the refunds cost them. Fair enough. Good business.

But that is exactly the point. Sasser had a choice and made it in public. The others had precisely the same choice, made the opposite one, and simply never issued a statement about it.

Image: CBP Photography / Public domain, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U_S_Customs_%26_Border_Protection_Port_of_New_York_-_Newark_Resumes_Vessel_and_Cargo_Container_Inspection_Following_Hurricane_Sandy_(8167655254).jpg