The PS5 Pro is not worth a near 50% price increase

As Sony finally release the PS5 Pro, a reader explains why he hasn’t bought it and compares it to the folktale of the emperor’s new clothes.

If Sony is upset about the constant stream of complaints that fans have sent its way over the last year and more they don’t show any sign of it. But that’s the problem. They don’t show any sign of anything. It’s like an AI is running the company and it purposefully tries to communicate as little as possible or it’ll give the game away. I’d almost believe that was happening, except there’s no way computer logic could have lead to the PS5 Pro.

Christmas is coming soon and I was pondering what to get (in conjunction with my girlfriend) for my big present. A PS5 Pro is the obvious answer, as I did get a PS4 Pro. It didn’t make that much a difference but it was nice knowing you had the most powerful version and I’m pretty sure by the end of the generation a lot of games were designed with it in mind, because even then they only barely ran well enough.

But if there’s going to be a similar problem this generation, I’ll just put up with it because the PS5 Pro price is absolutely ridiculous. The standard PlayStation 5 is £480 (and can probably be bought a bit cheaper at this point) but the PS5 Pro is an incredible £700. That’s a shocking 45% increase in price for reasons that Sony has been completely unable to demonstrate.

That reveal trailer would be funny if it wasn’t so ridiculous, with two versions of what seems to be exactly the same version of a game running at the same time. Apparently, we can’t see the important, and not at all trivial, changes because of YouTube resolutions and various other excuses, but if you can’t demonstrate the benefits of the console in a video that is specifically designed to do exactly that then something has gone very wrong.

It almost feels like a corporate bet to see if people will fall for it. ‘Just show the same thing twice and I bet people will convince themselves they’re actually different’, one exec may have said. (I’d use the name of whoever’s in charge of PlayStation now but I’m afraid I have no idea who they are. I can only assume they’re embarrassed to admit it, given how they haven’t made any public appearances.)

Seeing the footage, and everything that has come out since, reminds me of that meme about it being the same picture or, even more obviously, the fable of the emperor’s new clothes. If you remember, that story involves two con-men convincing the emperor, who always has to wear the newest and most fashionable clothes, that the outfit they’ve made for him is amazing but it’s invisible to idiots.

They are, of course, not selling him anything. They’re just tricking him into walking in the nude and getting paid for it, and because nobody wants to risk making themselves look stupid nobody says anything. According to Wikipedia this was written in 1837, so I guess some things never change, eh?

If the tiny improvements the PS5 Pro claims to have are important to you then I have no problem with the console existing. I’m not here to spoil anyone else’s fun but what I object to is Sony wasting their time with the PS5 Pro (and the PlayStation VR2) while doing so little to produce anything that the majority of their customers actually want.

It tells you something that Xbox does not have an equivalent to the PS5 Pro. Considering the number of mistakes they’ve made this generation, if even they realise a near-identical ‘upgrade’, that costs a fortune, is a bad idea then it should have been obvious to Sony too.

The idea of spending that sort of money when you already own a PlayStation 5… I just can’t get my head round it. People will though, so I guess in that sense you have to say that Sony aren’t so foolish after all.

By reader Tom Meadows