Games Inbox: Why is the PS5 Pro so expensive?

The Wednesday letters page struggles to understand the price of the PS5 Pro, as one reader insists God Of War is not a Soulslike.

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PS5 Pro-hibitively expensive
As usual, I think you did a good job of summing up mine, and probably most people’s, reaction to the PS5 Pro reveal in your article.

I seriously could not notice any major improvement or discernible difference between the graphics in most of those comparison gameplay videos they used to promote the power of the new hardware. The nearest I came was in the Ratchet & Clank bit, when they slowed the gameplay down, and I maybe noticed more frames in the PS5 Pro version, which made it look slightly smoother.

And when they showed the supposedly improved graphical detail over performance mode, well, I honestly could not notice any big improvement. (And why were they showing the gameplay within laughably small boxes, seriously were they trying to make it harder for anyone to tell the difference?!)

Then the price was revealed… and I let out a massive laughing snort. £700?! For a console with relatively minor graphical improvements, certainly indiscernible to the ordinary gamer, to what’s available already?! Quick, let me get my wallet!

I can only assume this is some sort of reverse psychology masterplan by Sony to make the original PlayStation 5 look much better value, so that anyone who is still thinking about joining the current console generation will think, ‘hmm, I’ll save £200 and just buy the original model instead’.
Stephen

GC: That’s the best explanation we’ve heard so far.

1 million space bucks
So… If the PS5 Pro with a disc drive costs £798.99 how much is a PlayStation 6 going to cost?

At that insultingly high price, Sony clearly are not going to sell many of the Pro iteration machines and I guess they’re OK with that because it gives them an excuse in three years’ time to bump up the Gen 10 entry price to £999.99 without even flinching.

What on earth were Sony thinking? Shareholders have a lot to answer for, not least the complete destruction of the high-end console market.

There is only one winner here and that’s Nintendo. After such a catastrophic reveal, the execs at Team Red must still be laughing into their profit margins.
Lawrie Pick

Spot the difference
I honestly don’t know what Sony are thinking. How do they expect to entice people to pay so much for the Pro when there’s such a small difference? They had to zoom in to demonstrate it. Then there’s no new games, the need to pay for a disc drive and a stand, they’re not even including the fancier version of their controller.

I keep thinking about buying a PlayStation 5 but each decision from Sony seems designed to deter me from bothering. I don’t particularly feel I’m missing out on exclusive titles, as I have an Xbox Series X and a Switch. Maybe the PlayStation 6 will be backwards compatible and I can catch up on the games I miss when skipping the 5, like, ummmm… Astro Bot and Spider-Man 2?

I really hope Nintendo announces the Switch 2 and we can have some good news since Sony and Microsoft are really fumbling things.
Euclidian Boxes

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No sale
Watched the PS5 Pro show and for me I didn’t really see any improvement. Maybe slightly, but not that much. The thing that made me swear out loud was the price. I bought the PlayStation 4 and the PS4 Pro, I bought the PlayStation 5 and I was going to buy the PS5 Pro as well. Or at least think about it, until I saw the price.

Is Sony on something? £700? They have got no chance, not in a month of Sundays will I be buying a Pro. I’ll stick with my standard PlayStation 5. There is no reason for anyone to have a Pro. No new games and I’m not playing old games just so I can say ‘Oh yeah, there is a difference.’ I’ll keep my money this time.
David

Bad comedy
Well, given how little interest I have in mid-gen upgrades, I had very low expectations and already thought the whole thing would be a complete waste, but even then I’m not convinced this PS5 Pro reveal isn’t some sort of joke.

The first few minutes were about showing us how genuinely incredible games look on a base PlayStation 5. Then he’s saying 75% of players choose performance mode, all the while showing side-by-sides where it’s hard to tell the difference in visual quality between the modes unless you slow down the footage and zoom in.

Then they spend half the time showing how good some old PlayStation 4 games look?! How many times did The Last of Us Part 2 show up?

All I can think of is they’re clearly putting the cart before the horse, deciding to push some fairly trivial tech ideas when there’s clearly absolutely no meaningful application or demand for it. Devs are requesting this from the platform holder? Sorry, but I take that with a boulder of salt. At the very least, if it’s true, why are platform holders being steered so heavily by businesses that don’t seem to have learned a single thing from the past four years?

Then that punchline. £700. At least they can sell it to us with the rationale that it only costs as much as 10 modern AAA games. If you’re interested in paying that much for this console and you somehow weren’t prepared to pay for a base PlayStation 5, I’ve got some extended warranties to sell you along with added volcano insurance and Prime soft drinks.

Possibly the worst own goal I’ve seen Sony score so far this gen, and that’s saying something, even just considering the past fortnight.

I’ll just close by saying one of the best-looking games I’ve ever played is still 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2. On a base PlayStation 4. And I’d bet Grand Theft Auto 6 still only runs at 30 frames per second on this thing. I’ll laugh so hard if that’s the case.
Panda

GC: Developers probably are asking for it, but they’re generally not business-oriented. It’s Sony and other publishers that should’ve realised the idea was madness at this price.

Seeing red
Whistler was saying that Sega did not do anything for the Dreamcast anniversary; in fact, they did something quite small, they released Dreamcast merchandise on Limited Run Games on Monday, for the 25th anniversary which was 9/9/99 (the original Dreamcast launch date in the US). Unfortunately, the merchandise doesn’t include a European Dreamcast logo, which was in blue because of a copyright. All the merchandise uses the American logo, which is in orange.

I am thinking of picking up the Dreamcast VMU keyring, as it does not cost too much!
Andrew J.
PS: Just received my Astro Bot game on Monday from ShopTo and what I have played so far is very, very good!

Like a Souls
I’ve noticed in recent years, that many action role-playing games are now categorised by some, including here on GameCentral, as a Soulslike. This includes games such as the recent God Of Wars, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, the Nioh games, and the recent Black Myth: Wukong.

God Of War isn’t anywhere comparable to Soulslikes and as for the others, the only thing they share is the death system but outside of that, they each play completely different. The Nioh games, for example, are fast-paced with combos and there’s more emphasis on loot and builds than anything else. If anything, it has more in common with games like Ninja Gaiden and Diablo. Yet nobody would call Nioh a ‘Diablo-like’ just because of the shared mechanism of how loot works simply because the whole gameplay is completely different.

Calling any game that shares one or two mechanics with the Souls series Soulslikes kinda does a disservice to these games in my opinion. It’ll be a bit like calling Dark Souls or Elden Ring ‘Monster Hunter-likes’ because of how Souls actually took inspiration from the methodical slow combat, stamina, and real-time healing with flasks from those games. It wouldn’t make sense because Dark Souls and Elden Ring both incorporate these mechanics differently, creating a different gameplay experience.

It’s the same with Nioh and Jedi: Fallen Order. As for God Of War, I’m not sure why anyone would compare that to a Soulslike in the first place unless Soulslike fans think that lock-on, blocking, and dodging was a Soulslike invention. Seeing the two recent God Of War games have Soulslike as a popular user tag on Steam makes me laugh. I think it just goes to show that many people can’t really define the genre in the first place.
Don

GC: We have never heard of anyone calling God Of War a Soulslike. That said, genre labels are increasingly meaningless in modern gaming, given most games are a mixture of several different genre types.

Mama mia
Does GC have any thoughts regarding the list Eurogamer published recently, of the Top 100 games to play right now?

Whilst any such list is ultimately subjective, I can’t help but feel that some glaring omissions (e.g. no 3D Mario game or Divinity: Original Sin 2) comes across as slightly performative and deliberately contrarian.
Mark Fitz

GC: We hadn’t seen the full list until now but while you could argue that Baldur’s Gate 3 covers for Divinity the lack of 3D Mario is certainly surprising. There seems to be some recency bias going on with many of the indie picks but any top 10 that has Nex Machina in it is all right in our books.

Gen on gen action
Now Sony and Microsoft are releasing on it, I’m shopping for a PC to play games at the highest quality settings at 60 fps and I’m learning just how costly that is.

Pound for pound the £700 all-digital PS5 Pro with a 2TB very fast SSD and controller stacks up very nicely against an all-digital PC with similar performance.

But we’re talking about console gaming, not PC gaming and it’s hard not to feel the PS5 Pro’s price and focus of delivering a high end-ish PC experience is the unwanted poster child for ills in gaming of dev times and budgets, brought about by going down a path of ever costly graphical fidelity and features.

All in the same week of Sony releasing the best reviewed game of the year, that is everything many feel console gaming should about, in Astro Bot. Fun, inventive, looks great without being obsessed with graphics. A game made in a reasonable time, at a reasonable budget with a reasonable size development team.

Maybe I’m wrong and Sony have read the room right. Cerny said ¾ of PlayStation 5 gamers choose performance mode and everyone went absolutely nuts for GTA 6’s reveal graphics. Maybe what Sony is offering in the PS5 Pro and the type of games it’s for is more relevant to modern customers than I think.

As I said, I’m someone who will seek out the best hardware to game on and we all love to see gen-on-gen improvements, love the SSDs in the current gen consoles. But the PS5 Pro has even me thinking maybe Sony and triple-A have really lost sight of what we should be trying to achieve when making games.

It’s not a new revelation, many have been arguing that point for a long time now. It’s just now and again something comes along that really underlines it.
Simundo

Inbox also-rans
Just realised that Sony got the name of the new machine wrong. PS5 Pro-fit. There. I fixed it. Now, you can get a second job and own one too. Or, maybe buy two! Mark Cerny is Ken Kutaragi and I claim my prize!
ZiPPi

£699 for PS5 Pro. I didn’t expect the price to be that high. I get it’s a niche product, but that pricing is ridiculous. It doesn’t even include the vertical stand. What were Sony thinking? I thought the absolute worst case scenario was £599, but expected in the region of £550. I’m lost for words.
Si

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