Sony has officially revealed the PS5 Pro, ending months of leaks and speculation with an underwhelming 9-minute presentation that saw lead system architect Mark Cerny trying his best to make the console sound much, much more enticing of an upgrade than it actually is. A larger GPU, faster rendering, a greater focus on ray tracing, better and more consistent frame rates, an entirely new proprietary supersampling technology in PSSR- on paper, the PS5 Pro sounds like a remarkable step forward, but it has failed to make a good first impression, which in turn is made much, much worse by the fact that the console is ridiculously priced.
When the PS5 Pro launches on November 7, Sony will sell it for a price of $699.99, a price that you’d be shocked at if Sony hadn’t consistently spent the entire PS5 generation making the worst possible pricing decisions. The base PS5 itself is still an arguably overpriced console, a fact that’s exacerbated by the many price increases Sony has implemented for the console itself and its accessories in different regions (and often multiple times, like in Japan)- not to mention switching to $70 games, having significantly higher PlayStation Plus subscription prices, selling the PS VR2 for a higher price than the console that it launched as an accessory for, or what have you. But even though the ridiculous pricing for the PS5 Pro is depressingly on-band for modern-day PlayStation, it’s still hard not to be shocked at the audacity of it.
Let’s start with the fact that for a great many people, the PS5 Pro is already hugely unnecessary to begin with. Close to four years into the PS5’s lifecycle, we’re only barely just getting started with this console generation. Cross-gen releases ruled the roost for what seemed like an eternity, and it’s onsports bettingly now that we’re starting to see developers making games specifically for current-gen hardware on a more widespread basis. We’re past the halfway point into this console generation, and the PS5 is still struggling to justify its own high price. To introduce a console that’s supposedly a more powerful version of the hardware that is only just beginning to come into its own doesn’t seem like a great idea to begin with.
But when that mid-gen console refresh is being sold for $700? At that point, to say the very least, it becomes crucial for Sony to have a really convincing first showing for the console. When we first saw the PS5 Pro, it needed to be with a sort of presentation that would effectively and abundantly convey its vast benefits over the base console, because at an asking price of $700, that’s the standard that the console is going to have to reach. And did the PS5 Pro reveal manage to do that? Let’s just be extremely polite about it say hell no.
A significant portion of the 9-minute presentation that saw Mark Cerny unveiling the PS5 Pro was dedicated to showing gameplay footage of titles running on the console, while also offering side-by-side comparisons with those same games running on a base PS5. Sadly, much of it was underwhelming. Sure, Gran Turismo 7 looks quite impressive with ray tracing enabled, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart boasts a greater level of detail in the backgrounds, and the prospect of playing The Last of Us Part 2 at 60 FPS with the best possible visual fidelity is an exciting one- but ultimately, what we have seen so far are little more than marginal upgrades in the grand scheme of things, which, to say the very least, is a massively underwhelming way to debut a console that is going to be sold for $700.
The fact that Sony hasn’t revealed the PS5 Pro with gameplay footage for any major upcoming title (like Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, for instance) hasn’t exactly helped matters, especially because many of the games that we did see – from Control and Horizon Forbidden West to Gran Turismo 7 and The Last of Us Part 2 – are cross-gen titles, and maybe not the most exciting picks to show off a hardware upgrade with. These were games that were nowhere close to getting the most out of the base PS5, so to use them to demonstrate what a more powerful version of the console is capable of just seems like yet another in a lost list of poor decisions by Sony where the PS5 Pro is concerned.
Oh, and here’s something that’s really annoying, even if it doesn’t really matter too much in the larger picture. Sony, you’re selling a mid-gen console refresh for $700, a decision that in and of itself reeks of either unbelievable hubris, and that $700 doesn’t even include a disc drive, by the way (which, incidentally, is yet another way to send people deeper down the digital rabbit hole, where there are no guarantees of permanent ownership even for games that you’ve bought and paid for). Is it too much to ask that you do not sell the console’s vertical stand separately? Because boy oh boy, talk about nickel and diming.
There is, of course, a very obvious argument to be made that the PS5 Pro is not meant as a mass appeal device at all, but that it is instead being made for the enthusiasts. There’s little doubt that within that specific demographic, the PS5 Pro is obviously going to do well, regardless of its price. But it’s hard not to look at the console and think of it as a waste- a waste because the base PS5 is only just beginning to get its engines warm, which makes it unlikely that anyone is going to do too much with the PS5 Pro that’s going to be too impressive. And if that’s the console that Sony is releasing, the prospect of spending $700 on it also seems like an exorbitant waste.
It’s honestly hard to figure out why Sony is even making the PS5 Pro. Unlike the PS4, which was already an outdated piece of kit even when it released, the PS5 still has a great deal of juice left in it that developers haven’t come anywhere close to fully squeezing out, on account of the incredibly slow start this console generation has suffered, so it’s not like there was any need for a more powerful console. On paper, one could argue that the release of a mid-gen console refresh would help revitalize hardware sales for Sony, which is an area where the PS5 has been declining over half year- but at $700, you have to wonder whether the PS5 Pro is going to have enough mass appeal to be able to do that.
It’s next to impossible to imagine anything the console could do that could ever justifying that price- but if nothing else, one would hope that we get to see upcoming games like Death Stranding 2, Grand Theft Auto 6, and others running on a PS5 Pro sooner rather than later, and that they actually look significantly and meaningfully better than they will on the base PS5. Because that’s the level that the PS5 Pro needs to be hitting to come anywhere close to maybe sort of justifying its price tag.
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