After years of rumors, speculation, and leaks, the PS5 Pro was officially revealed in a technical presentation by PlayStation’s Mark Cerny, a brilliant, soft spoken man who manages to constantly have the energy of the scientist nobody believes at the beginning of a natural disaster movie. Mark has a knack [Ed. Note: Mark Cerny was the director of the 2013 PlayStation game, Knack] for explaining detailed and sophisticated advancements in console hardware in a way that the average simpleton who just wants to play good looking games on their TV can understand. After all, since the dawn of video games, one of the primary needs of the average consumer outside of the far more important question of “is it fun?” has been “does it look cool?”
Trying to pitch the technical abilities of a super powerful console using side by side footage presented in a live-streamed YouTube video most people watch on their five-year-old phones obviously has its own set of challenges, but the biggest hurdle to get people to buy a PS5 Pro isn’t convincing them to head on down to their local Best Buy so they can see all the glorious new dirt textures being added to The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered.
No, it’s the price, and when it comes to the PS5 Pro, it's a huge one. That’s because the PlayStation 5 Pro, the newest and most high-end model in the PlayStation console family costs $700 in the U.S. or £700 in the UK, and over a thousand dollars in Canada. It’s also, adorably, all digital, meaning it doesn’t come with a disc drive. If you own physical copies of PS5 games, or any of your back catalog for that matter, you’ll have to buy a PS5 disc drive for an additional eighty bucks. Oh, and it also doesn’t come with a vertical stand. That will run you an extra thirty bucks, in case you want your PS5 to not look like it’s fallen and can’t get up. All in all it's probably the most sticker shock I’ve felt about a console price reveal since the PS3 was announced in 2006 to cost $599 US dollars — a number that people scoffed at so hard Sony was forced to drop the price by a hundred dollars months later. The PS3 price reveal’s energy is back, baby. They’ll remake anything these days.
The PS5 Pro is for the diehard PlayStation fans out there who want their games to look as good as possible but also don’t want to deal with the flexibility, hassle, or price that comes with building or buying a high-end gaming PC.
See, on the PC gaming side of things, gamers are used to a much more, do-it-yourself modular approach, swapping out graphics cards, RAM, and GPUs in the endless pursuit of “number go up.” There’s a tangible reward to throwing money into a large case full of fans and LED lights and there’s an entire community built around helping others out to do so. Game developers and hardware companies like NVIDIA and AMD certainly do their part but it’s largely the user mod scene that keeps old games looking new years after the companies that made them have moved on. If you truly care about having access to the largest library of video games ever made and the endlessly scalable experience of playing the best looking version of those games that you ever could, you pretty much need to own a gaming PC. I don’t make the rules.
Plus, many modern PlayStation 5 games seem to keep making their way to PC these days anyway, like Helldivers 2 the day it launche,d or God of War: Ragnarok just under two years after it came to PS5, so it seems PlayStation doesn’t mind if you have a gaming PC, either.
But with all their infinite power, custom built texture packs, endless emulation, and ray-tracing support for a canceled, obtuse, Japanese rhythm arcade game from 1987, there’s one thing that PC gamers won’t have for a long time, or at least won’t have for a while after console gamers have it, and that’s Grand Theft Auto 6.
GTA 6 is going to be a generation-defining game release, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. It will be one of the biggest and most lucrative media events in modern human history, a sequel to one of the most ridiculously best selling games of all time, the first truly huge system seller of the PS5 and Xbox Series X generation, and the most excited anyone has ever been about Florida. And it isn’t launching day one on PC.
That means if you’re excited to play GTA6 when it drops – and considering the reveal trailer has nearly 210m views in nine months, it seems like a few of you are – you’re gonna need a current-gen Xbox or PlayStation. And that’s where things get interesting. See, Rockstar isn’t playing around with GTA 6. It’s allegedly been in development for over a decade and is clearly shaping up to be the most impressively detailed and sophisticated open-world crime game ever made. After all, this is from the same studio that designed the horse testicles to shrink when it gets cold outside in its last huge open-world game, Red Dead Redemption 2.
And think back for a moment – Red Dead Redemption 2 launched a year after the mid-gen Xbox and PS4 hardware refreshes, the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, and definitely benefited from their improved power and resolution. If the timing lines up again, we might see a similar pattern with GTA 6, the PS5 Pro, and maybe the yet-to-be-revealed more powerful Xbox Series X.
Now back to that price, since again it’s a big one. Seven hundred dollars plus tax, disc drives, stands, $70 games, controllers and a TV good enough to take advantage of it all is absolutely nothing to scoff at. But Grand Theft Auto 6 is only one game — a game that right now is just one trailer from nine months ago — so Sony needed to bring out a couple of other games to convince you to buy their new PS5 Pro, and boy did they not.
We saw games like Hogwarts Legacy, a game that you can play on Nintendo Switch. There was a lot of victory lapping on marginal improvements for games that are already immensely popular on PlayStation and elsewhere, but there was no killer, brand new first-party title from Sony for the PS5 Pro launch. Games sell consoles but Sony is hoping the games it already sold you are enough to carry that big price this time around. Hilariously though, Sony’s biggest game this fall – after the total collapse and subsequent removal of Concord, its multi-million dollar failed games as a service game – is Astro Bot, a cute hop and bop platforming game starring a lovely little robot mascot and his merry gang of PlayStation tie-in friends.
Astro Bot is one of the best reviewed games of 2024 and one of my favorite games of the generation. But at absolutely no point while playing it did I say “man, I really wish this game was running on more powerful hardware because there just aren’t enough sprinkles on the floor in the ice cream level.” It’s a lovely game from a small team made on a smaller budget in just a few years and people adore it because it’s an absolute blast. It’s gorgeous looking for sure, but visuals alone aren’t why people are playing it.
Sony insists that somewhere between 40 and 50 games will see PS5 Pro improvements when the console launches on November 7th, but the games it showed off during its reveal were a smattering of things you probably played already mixed with improvements you probably never even thought needed improving, like the crowd sizes in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart or the trees in Spider-Man 2.
Now wondering what people “need” when describing a fun and frivolous hobby that most engage with in their spare time is meaningless. Some folks are content playing their games however and wherever they have access to them without worrying about, or even thinking about, maximizing the graphics, resolution, and framerate. And neither party is wrong, but one definitely speaks with their wallets louder than the other. Mat Piscatella, an executive director at Circana, a platform that tracks consumer sales data and trends across the games industry and more, revealed the purchasing stats behind the PlayStation 4 Pro, Sony’s last foray into a mid generation hardware revision. He stated that in the US, the PS4 Pro accounted for 13% of the PS4’s total lifetime sales as well as 15% of dollars and surmised that the PS4 Pro succeeded at driving the incremental sales to the super enthusiast and not the mass base.
We won’t know if the PS5 Pro hits similar percentages for a long time but my gut says the high price will turn people off, at least for a while. On IGN we’re currently running a poll about interest in the PS5 Pro that over 9,000 video game obsessed readers have voted in and as of now, with roughly nine percent of users saying they’ll buy a PS5 Pro and a whopping 70% saying it’s too expensive.
When Sony released the PS4 Pro, a mid-generation hardware refresh that promised to double the power of the PS4 and deliverbetter frame rates, HDR, and, most importantly, 4K resolution rather than 1080p, things were a little bit different. At the time 4K TVs were all the rage and becoming the new standard and Sony illustrated this point with a graphic on its official website that implied you wouldn’t be able to see past a horse's ass if you didn’t upgrade your console. By then the PS4 — which launched at $400 — had dropped to $300, making the new and improved PS4 Pro’s $400 launch price seem not totally preposterous.
Also, used games stores and trade-in deals at big box retailers were significantly more common than they are now, making the process of getting rid of your old console in favor of a new one fairly painless. I distinctly remember trading in my launch PS4 and getting a PS4 Pro for under two hundred bucks total. As of right this second, Gamestop will give you $350 for your launch disc drive model of the PS5, meaning you’ll still have to drop another $350 (plus the cost of a disc drive) if you want the PS5 Pro. That’s a huge ask for the average, cash-strapped consumer in an economic climate that’s far more bleak than it was in 2016. It might be an easier pillto swallow when Grand Theft Auto 6 is released or when we finally find out more about upcoming first-party PlayStation games like Wolverine and Sucker Punch’s follow-up to 2020’s Ghost of Tsushima, but right now that’s three games with no release dates versus a console with a very high price.
High prices seem to be the norm with Sony these days. This is the same company that has increased the price of the PS5 in most regions around the world, and recently announced the prices of controllers were going up by five bucks. It’s a pretty stark contrast to 2017 when the PS4 Pro launched against an already price reduced PS4. Maybe that’s because things seem worse for everyone everywhere moneywise now, at least since the pandemic.
Everything is more expensive and seemingly harder to produce for every company and Sony has decided to pass the problem on to the consumers. At the same time, out-of-control game development costs and the length of time it takes to actually make a big, graphically stunning AAA game these days has created a different but parallel problem: the PS5 –and Xbox for that matter – simply doesn’t have a huge catalog of big, exclusive games you can’t play them anywhere else.
A lot of Sony’s biggest games are either also available on PC, or still receive PS4 ports, which weirdly, four years into this generation, is still the console where still half of PlayStation users are playing their games. Now, none of this truly matters considering the best-selling and most played games on both the current gen and last gen consoles are either multiplatform games like Madden and Call of Duty (and of course, Grand Theft Auto) or endless games as a service games like Fornite and Apex Legends. That means truly exclusive games might not matter as much as they used to. But if roughly half of all PlayStation users are still playing on PS4 then that begs the bigger questions: why haven’t they come to PS5 yet and will a $700 PS5 Pro finally be the thing that gets them to do that? Right now it doesn’t really seem like it.
Gaming is more popular than ever, but that’s not necessarily because of high-end consoles. Through mobile, laptops and tablets that people already use for work or school, or a Nintendo Switch which is regularly bundled with a game or two for half the price of a PS5 Pro, or last gen consoles that many just don’t see the need to move on from, people are playing video games however they can access them. To many, convenience is as important as fidelity and so they just want to have fun without breaking the bank.
Then, of course, there’s the serious hardcore aficionados who want their games to look incredible on their huge OLED TVs and high end gaming monitors. There will always be a place for people like that — myself included — but it’s hard to see if we’re a big enough audience to justify making and selling a $700 PS5 Pro four years after buying a PS5 during a console generation that hasn’t really found its footing yet. But if there’s one thing that might bring us all together, it’s Grand Theft Auto 6, a game that doesn’t have a release date and definitely won’t be there when the PS5 Pro launches this November. Until then we’ll have to ask ourselves what we’re willing to pay to see the forest from the trees.
Brian Altano is an executive producer at IGN.
