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The PS5 5 Pro has just been announced, and tucked away at the end of the presentation, Mark Cerny revealed the staggering price of the console. At $699, it’s one of the most expensive home consoles we’ve seen in past years. It’s not ‘the’ most expensive, there have been plenty of others which – when with price adjusted for inflation – stomp all over the Pro’s price. For example, the Neo Geo, roughly $1,200 in todays standards. For a modern home console though, it’s day light robbery, especially when building a PC can be done in and around the same price range.
PlayStation recently increased the price of the DualShock controller by $5, which should have been a sign that this announcement wasn’t going to please fans.
With the base PS5 model priced at $499 MSRP, and the digital version at $399, paying close to double that for the PS5 Pro already seems as bit futile. Fair enough, it might be the ‘most powerful console’ PlayStation has ever made, and it might be 45 percent faster, but those performance gains are on paper only. With the cap really at 4K and 60FPS, paying the 300 odd extra for just that feels a bit like a kick in the teeth.
With Concord’s crash landing recently, it’s not really a surprise that PlayStation has chosen such a devastating price for the console. There’s no concrete evidence to suggest a correlation, but the millions lost on the live-service failure have to be made up somehow. Astro Bot’s widely successful launch is not enough to recoup on the losses, either.
The console isn’t even launching with a disk drive, so you’re going to have to pick up an external piece of kit that’s going to set you back even more. If you’re upgrading from a disk console to this, bare in mind the hidden costs. The same goes for the vertical stand, which PlayStation kindly pointed out is also sold separately.
The $699 price tag for the PS5 Pro has already garnered a disappointed reaction. The diskless version of the original was the affordable version, so the fact this is the cheapest option to enjoy the primary promise of the next-generation console.
Pre orders for the console begin later this month, and the release date is scheduled for November too. Closer to the date, I think we’re going to see PlayStation struggle to earn the purchases it’s expecting. Gamers have been burned recently. Xbox has proven its lack of commitment to console gaming, while it looks like PlayStation is going to squander the home console monopoly it was about to enjoy. In fact, that could also be a cause. With Xbox likely to switch over entirely to streaming, it’s possible that PlayStation are testing the extents to which they can squeeze.
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