A reader explores rumours of Sony releasing the PS5 Pro this year and realises it could make perfect sense for PlayStation.
Sony hasn’t announced the PS5 Pro yet, but everyone knows it’s coming. There are leaks all the time and most of them seem to be pretty consistent, promising a bigger upgrade than from PlayStation 4 to PS4 Pro. All the rumours mention being better at ray-tracing, while the latest one says Sony has it’s own upscaling tech as well – so 4K and even 8K will presumably be the norm.
Assuming this is all true, and I don’t see any reason to doubt it, I think the question for most people is simply: why? What games is this for? What games or features are running so badly that we need this kind of upgrade, especially when Sony is announcing and releasing so few new games nowadays?
There are third party games, of course, but by and large they’re not going to go to the trouble of supporting the extra features of the PS5 Pro, when it’s much easier and cost effective to make all the versions of a game essentially the same. So what is the PS5 Pro for?
Sony’s obsession with releasing new hardware, that nobody wants, is by now well documented. We only got Spider-Man 2 from them last year but for some reason we also got the PlayStation VR2 and PlayStation Portal, which they completely failed to promote and seemed to instantly forget about.
Maybe that was a result of plans put in motion too long ago to stop but I can’t see how the PS5 Pro would be in the same position, considering it’s not coming out until this Christmas and they’re probably going to leave the final spec until quite late, to ensure they get the best/cheapest parts possible.
If nothing else I would’ve thought they’d want to change their plans given the whole madness of the last few months, with all the talk of going multiformat and somehow magically getting 2 billion extra people playing games. Although I’m willing to guess that won’t be via an extra expensive mid-generation console upgrade.
But then I got to thinking about what the wider picture is for consoles in the future and how the PS5 Pro would fit into that. And I realised that releasing it does make sense after all. Maybe not at this exact moment, given the lack of first party games, but in general the PS5 Pro can be seen as what consoles in general will evolve into: expensive luxuries for hardcore gamers, that are of little use or interest to ordinary people.
Once companies begin to focus even more on mobile and streaming, consoles are going to go the way of the VHS player. Except it’ll still be true that consoles will give you the best performance, it’s just your average Joe won’t want to pay £70 for a video game anymore.
But for those that care about what and how they play, consoles will still be essential – which is pretty much what Xbox’s Phil Spencer has already said. Consoles will become the equivalent of that stupidly expensive cinema speaker set-up your movie nut friend has, that you think is a waste of money and barely makes any difference.
That doesn’t mean I think the PS5 Pro is a good idea right now – I still think it should be bottom of Sony’s priority list – but there is more logic to it than I originally thought. If consoles are to become a luxury item, instead of mass-market electronics, then the PS5 Pro fits in perfectly with that future vision.
By reader Celeborn
The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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