Rent-seeking seems a silly term here. If you just mean "charging a fortune" then there are other consoles to buy. And consoles are luxury goods, so if they get too expensive people just won't buy them in the first place.
I beg to differ. Piracy and mod-chips on earlier consoles was rampant (in my country).
Anyone I knew with a PS2 had it 'chipped' and only had pirated games because the price of the console (which was also a DVD player) was more easily digestible than the price of original games which came at huge mark-ups to compensate for the console HW which were sold at a loss in the eerier stages.
