PlayStation 5 Pro announced with a hefty price

At the end of the day, who will need this to play any of their games? As you can tell from the endless discourse yesterday on social media and the headline above, Sony’s latest version of the PlayStation 5 is costing a pretty penny. The tech details were shown off by the lead of PlayStation architecture, Mark Cerny, but we’ll get to those in a minute. The price of the new machine, PlayStation 5 Pro, starts at $699.99/€799.99/£699.99/¥119,980. Oh, it gets worse, as this is the digital-only version, with the disc version costing an extra $79.99 for a disc drive.

So aside from doing a Trip Hawkins with the pricing, what exactly can this new machine do? According to Cerny, there is a larger, beefier GPU jammed in there, better ray tracing, AI-driven upscaling, and a fidelity mode that aims not to drop your frame rate like a stone. Oh and a 2TB SSD so COD can have even larger stupid updates that take weeks for some people to download. According to Cerny, this new GPU for the extra price will render 45% faster than the standard console with the ray tracing calculations being double or even tripled compared to the standard hardware.

With the other major advancement on the horizon when you have enough money for a PC but buy a console instead, the new PS5 Pro will have “PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution.” This is AI-powered upscaling that is new to the PS5 Pro and Cerny said that this “analyses game images pixel by pixel and adds an extraordinary amount of detail.” There is also a push to say the new console will be able to hit 8K resolutions. Here is the problem, show me a single game that benefits from that at all, then show me a game that can do that on consoles.

People have been quick to defend this upgrade in hardware for one Rockstar-based reason. “Oh well, GTA 6 will need this extra hardware to run properly,” I’ve heard certain people who should know better saying: “Here’s the trouble with that theory, games are developed to the most common denominator in hardware” meaning the lowest-performing piece of hardware in the current generation of that game is typically the stone slung around its neck. You’ll see minor performance/graphical fidelity differences between consoles, but whichever has the least amount of power is typically the thing holding certain games and the generation back.

Sure, this new piece of hardware is almighty-powerful, but who is going to use it? Better still, who is going to buy it? There is even speculation among tech people that the PS5 Pro could sell even fewer than the PS4 Pro. Though VGC notes that research firm, Ampere Analysis, suggests that the PS5 Pro could sell just as many consoles as the PS4 Pro… by 2029.

That’s 2.6 million units a year, which last I checked would be to the tune of 1.8 billion dollars a year that everyone’s supposed to have lying around. Keep in mind that by Last December at the price of $499/$399, the PS5 (standard base and digital) had only sold 50 million. We’re talking about a quarter of those sales for hardware that is nearly double the lowest price. I don’t know who this console is for other than the resolution chasers when it releases this November 7th.