PlayStation 5 Pro Will Cost $700

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/09/10/the-ps5-pro-reveals-sky-high-price-2024-release-date/

Today, Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro and talked about some of its features. These included an upgraded GPU and AI implication to name a few. The Forbes article above gives more details. However, the main thing that got people talking is the huge price. Many believed the PS5 Pro would cost between $550 and $600. For it to cost nearly $1K at $700, has got people scratching their heads. This along with the announcement that Dual Sense controllers will also get a price increase, despite them not caring to fix the stick drift issues, many believe Sony is once again on their arrogant PS3 nonsense.

What do you think?

Personally, I think it's a waste of money. For $700, you can get a decent gaming PC that is a full computer, not just a console to play video games. The lack of a disc drive for that price is also very telling. Not that it bothers me much, because my PS5 is also a digital one, but for that high price a drive should be standard. This ultimately what happens when you don't have good competitions. Because Xbox is struggling, Sony doesn't think they need to cater to the consumers to a point, and stuff like this happens. I'm personally fine with my PS5 and I have a gaming PC that is good enough to play modern games at decent settings. So it's a hard pass for me. But some people suffer from FOMO, so some units will still sell.

Anyway, the upgrade will be released November 7, 2024.

This seems like it serves a nearly nonexistent market segment. Anyone who knows enough to be annoyed at low framerates and resolutions will quickly realize that it's a much better value prospect to just get a PC. The vast majority of existing PS5 owners won't see any reason to upgrade from their base model consoles, especially not for a $400 premium. The only group of people I could see who would buy this in any numbers are well-off adults who can get talked into buying a console to play the new Call of Duty/NBA/Madden with their buddies, and just get the more expensive one because they don't do any research and the money isn't a big deal to them. That... doesn't seem like a particularly robust group of customers for Sony to hang its hat on...

I agree with your thoughts, from my impressions about the upgraded variant of consoles in general compared to their previous iterations, just mainly for higher specs to be capable of running on higher resolution and may offer higher frames per second. I guess the Xbox Series X's upgraded variant may end up like the PS5 Pro in terms of price tag.

Edit: Here is a side note, I like to bring up Assetto Corsa Evo (A future third-party racing simulator from Kunos Simulazioni s.r.l.), I would rather see this on the PC, PlayStation 6 and the next Xbox instead of PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and the Nintendo Switch 2, judging on its early screenshots (Which looks pretty eye candy for promotional purposes), it gives me the feeling that the PS5 and Xbox Series X may not able to handle it on 60 FPS, and I guess Nintendo Switch 2 may not able to run that on 30 FPS well.

Sony has fully grown back their late PS2/ early PS3 era ego, I see. Would be a great time for MS to put them in their place again…if microsoft wasn’t already too busy repeatedly smashing their own face into a wall, that is.

I think it's pretty clear that this is directed towards people who already have a PS5, were probably among the first adopters, and would like the shiny new thing. Grubb has pointed out that these people will likely sell or trade in their current PS5s, and cheaper used consoles will be attractive for the "waiting for a price cut" / late adopter crowd. That'll end up expanding the PS5 userbase; the question now is by how much. This isn't to say people won't take the plunge, but it's also likelier that this isn't a significant bloc until GTA 6 comes out.

Mostly I'm interested in what this means for the next generation of consoles. We're probably 2-4 years away, if the Microsoft self-own leak from the FTC trial is to be believed. Sony is obviously comfortable with a high console price tag right now, and Microsoft sounds like they want to offer some kind of mini-PC. If this price point works out for Sony, we could see companies start at this price or inch closer to $1000. It was laughable two decades ago, but now it really does feel like they can get away with it.

The $700 price is absurd, but the thing that killed me was earlier in that stream they did with Cerny, and him going on about how the Pro is going to be the solution to the graphics mode problem (that they manufactured for themselves by the way), and then saying it will deliver "near fidelity mode" graphics. Does that mean my PS5 will run at a higher fidelity than a Pro? Doesn't sound like they solved anything to me. Just found a better middle ground.

The price in Canada for that thing after tax is over a grand. That's just way too much for what you get, especially considering the base slim discless model PS5 often goes on sale for slightly more than half that (I saw it on sale recently for I think $520. The PS5 Pro is $960). Also yeah, the DualSense got bumped up $10 here as well, to $95. It's just getting to be too much for what you get (especially since DualSense controllers still have severe drift issues).

With them barely releasing any PS5 exclusives that I'm interested in (basically just Astro Bot. The Final Fantasy games are going to hit PC sooner or later) and these increasingly wild prices, I just see no reason to buy a PS5, especially if you have a PC.

Hopefully soon prices will come back down to earth, or at least stop increasing. All these companies are blaming inflation but I don't believe it anymore. It's just them trying to squeeze even more money out of consumers. I follow the guitar and bike industries too and both of them heavily ratcheted up their prices during the pandemic blaming demand but have kept them there ever since even after pandemic demand stopped. Both industries have had their sales essentially flatline over the last year or two and now mysteriously the prices of things are coming down even though they had claimed that it wasn't possible.

I'm sure all those PS4 games will look even more spectacular re-re-upgraded to this $700 not-a-PC.

That's what stuck out to me the most. Some of the stuff they showcased was from the PS4 era. It's like, yeah it looks a bit better but I already played it. I'm good.

If this goes on long enough, there's going to be as many PS5 console variants as there are exclusive games.

I'm ostensibly in the proper demographic for this... people can say "oh you can get a gaming PC for..." don't want one. I'm done with PC gaming and I resent anything that drags me back to it.

But that being said they're not gonna sell me this box on "look at all the old games that'll look better" either.

What if everyone just agreed that the current consoles are powerful enough to last us for a while and devs started focusing on cheaper-to-produce games that look quite good and run at a smooth framerate instead of chasing excessive levels of detail that bring these machines to their knees and push us into the next generation just so we can play games that run as smoothly as they did at the start of the last generation.

In Japan, the Pro will sell for almost 120,000 yen. That's insane. Like, I understand that the yen is very weak right now and if converted to USD, that's $857 (which is still pretty crazy). But to me? My paycheck hasn't scaled in a similar fashion so 120,000 yen still feels like $1,200.

Inflation is hell. It's important to remember that the famed 599 US dollars announcement for the PS3 in 2006 would have equaled about 935 dollars today adjusted for inflation.

There's a lot of good takes in this thread that I agree with. The PS4 Pro and Xbox One X upgrade consoles felt significant at the time, because their original counterparts had been so under powered. That's not the situation now. I feel like Sony has made a lot of bad hardware choices lately with the PSVR 2 and now this and they've largely gotten away with it when Microsoft have been wading in their own problems.

Let's see how this thing sells, but in my friends group even the people who were modestly interested in an upgrade are now cooling their jets due to the high price.

This thing is dead in the water.

Setting aside the egregious price tag (£700, roughly translates to over $900) we're looking at the same memory (16GB) at a slightly higher speed, the same CPU, no disc drive and not even a measly stand. It's going to be heavily relying on AI upscaling from the new GPU, which really isn't that significant of an improvement. I suspect the difference in game performance/visuals will be something only Digital Foundry will be able to notice.

well my regular ol' PS5 hasn't suddenly turned to ash, so this product isn't really for me. i've never really chased performance despite being an ostensible member of the 'enthusiast' crowd.

it is interesting though- between the price and the limited fidelity increases, it's firmly a luxury product- which means Sony recognizes they're selling to a subset of a subset.

or thinking another way- it feels like a product that's intended to drive attention to a whole product line rather than be a person's entry point into the ecosystem. it feels very Apple.

I made an audible gasp when I saw the price, but were seeing the consequence of inflation and tech no longer falling in price like it use to. It'll be interesting where the Switch 2 and next gen price lands.

Guys, I forgot to mention that the PS5 Pro lacks a disc drive, which reminds me of how the PSP Go didn't have a UMD Drive, making it digital only.

Off-topic: I prefer the PS3 and Xbox 360 more than the PSP.

800 euro in Europe is a fucking outrageous price.

700 bucks is about 635 euro. What the fuck is that? 165 euros extra?

Fuck that. One of the things I was going to treat myself to in the new year was a ps5, and now it would just feel completely sub optimal to not buy a pro, but at that price point I say fuck Sony completely and I'm just going to put that money towards a gaming PC.

Mental price.

PS4 Pro Announcement - "This is Ghost of Tsushima, the next big Playstation exclusive. It's got a huge, gorgeous open world with voodoo-fast load times. A game experience like this is only possible thanks to the increased power of the PS4 Pro."

PS5 Pro Announcement - "This is a Ratchet and Clank game released over three years ago. Now, if you push your face right up against the TV and look very closely, you can clearly see a minor improvement to the visual fidelity of a background crowd no one was looking at to begin with. Also, it's $700. And it doesn't have a disc drive. Or a stand."

@turkthomas: I think your memory is a little fuzzy other than 1800p on PS4 Pro, Ghost of Tsushima was exactly the same on base PS4 including load times.

PS5 Pro will run fidelity mode at performance mode frame rates, considering stuff like Space Marine 2 & Jedi Survivor are 1080p or lower in performace the difference would be easily noticeable.

Lots of inflation comments. I’m not going to deny it exists, butttttt…Sony is posting record profits, and their gaming division is a big part of it. Ergo, they’re definitely going to be making a hefty profit because, well, until Xbox shapes up or more folks actually do go the pc route, there’s no reason not to price this (and everything else, cough, controller price increase) as high as they feel.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/07/sony-earnings-q1.html

“ Gaming, for which Sony is well-known thanks to its popular PlayStation consoles, banked revenues of 864.9 billion yen in the quarter, up 12% from 771.9 billion yen a year ago.”

So, yeah, capitalism gonna capitalize.

Yeah it's a tough sell, but I don't know about this yet. I think for a lot of people, ultimately, the difference of a few hundred dollars doesn't mean much for a device that you use for many years. And I'm sure there are people especially on this forum that have multiple gaming devices, including a PC already. For my part the PS5 is the only active gaming system that I don't own, and I'm still occasionally thinking about buying it.

I think the thing that makes or breaks this thing is how good the upscaling is. It needs to be damn near perfect for this price, but maybe it is. I'm curious to see how it performs in benchmarks when it's released.

I never would've upgraded to a PS5 at all if my PS4 didn't die, and now with most of the "exclusives" being ported to PC anyway there's no real reason for me to upgrade any further.

Boy, that price sure is something.

People have been bringing up inflation, which is definitely a thing. I brought it up myself a while ago in a topic about the price increase of a triple-A game to $70. I maintain that it had to happen eventually, even with all the godforsaken MTX's our games are filled with nowadays. But for consoles, generally they're priced to move because the manufacturers know they will then fleece you on the software in their closed ecosystem... all the more so now that physical games have been almost entirely phased out and the secondhand market has collapsed.

This does not seem priced to move units. Of course these companies have in the past taken losses before on their hardware if need be, but I guess Sony is simply in a strong enough market position that they just don't care if they don't sell all that many? I mean, there seem to be only two types of people who would buy these things:

(1) Cash-flush hobbyists who don't mind dropping a huge sum on a fairly negligible upgrade;

(2) People buying their first PS5 or replacing a broken one.

I can't image that first group being a large audience. The hobbyists who are obsessive enough to go for such an upgrade are probably also savvy enough not to, if that makes sense... either because then can move to PC for better specs or just realize how little benefit there will really be. It's certainly a hard pass for me even though I've continued to be mostly a console guy.

As for the second group, TBH, if my PS5 broke down around the time the Pro releases (and couldn't be repaired cheaply), then I would, in fact, go for the new one, because the extra SSD space and the little extra power boost is enough for me to justify the expense of something I'd plan to have for a while. Perhaps they put this out mostly for this reason, to give a slightly enhanced option for new purchasers, and because the presumed PS6 probably won't be coming anytime soon. I imagine they'll start pushing the Pro over the Slim moving forward.

But yeah, I get the sense that even Sony doesn't expect this thing to sell like hotcakes at the price point they've set. Maybe they just feel they need to put out some new box every five years for... reasons. To stay relevant, I suppose, at least in their own eyes.

yeah- i mean, folks should bear in mind the announcement was a whopping 9 minutes of marketing-speak with no new games and missing that typical reel of devs saying "[new console] changes everything!"

that tells me- this isn't some new pillar or target spec as much as a segment designed for those who can afford it or to make the base model (relatively) more palatable to the price-sensitive consumer. it's the ipad pro that indirectly moves a lot of base model ipads (or at least i think that's what sony wants it to be).

it's for a subset of a subset who can make discretionary $700 purchases, and will likely sell numbers in accordance with that. at least until GTA6 is in the channel, and then who knows what happens.

With inflation and the current high price of tech atm I would not be surprised if next gen gets pushed a few years, the PS5 Pro might be on the market longer. You can easily see cross gen for the PS6 almost lasting the entier gen. We might not even get a clean break at all, the PS6 could just be a PS5 Pro Pro. Also depending on how good PSSR is the PS5 Pro could be a viable option much longer than any other console previously, that 700 might stretch a very long way.

Okay, first: "For it to cost nearly $1K at $700.."

That math isn't mathing. If I owed you $1,000 but I only paid you $700 that wouldn't be okay because $700 is NOT nearly $1K, right?

Am I going to buy the Pro? Nope. I bought the PS4 pro because it made sense with what I wanted at the time - that little boost so that it displayed well with my UHDTV. I don't need better ray tracing, I am well satisfied with the look and framerate with my PS5 games now.

With that said, I think $700 is fine. It is a price that 'the niche' of the Playstation's audiences will pay. Sony does not need me to buy it. If didn't have a PS5 I'd buy the pro because why not have the system that has the edge for games in 2025 to 2027 for Sony.

Honestly, if you want something cheaper that looks really good buy a XBox SerX, or a PS5. They had the update that mattered - faster loading.

$700 sounds like a lot but I think there's a not insignificant number of people who upgraded to very fancy OLED TVs. Those things can cost thousands so an extra $700 to really show off your new TV is probably reasonable.

Yeah, this sounds right. It bears repeating that the point of selling a console is to get you into a closed ecosystem and sell you software in it, so it doesn't really matter to Sony which type of PS5 you buy as long as you buy one of them... especially since backward compatibility is likely to continue moving forward, incentivizing PS5 owners of whichever model toward buying the PS6, whenever the hell that actually happens.

One does have to wonder what the heck the defining feature(s) of a next-gen console will actually be at this point. For this latest gen it was SSDs, which was pretty low-hanging fruit. What next? VR hasn't exactly been a rip-roaring success, so I doubt it will be any kind of native VR. But nothing else even comes to mind. Is the PS6 just going to end up being a small increase in power similar to what the PS5 Pro is going to be over the base model? I guess we'll see.

If I were to guess, the next Microsoft and Sony gaming system will be PC/Console hybrids with even stronger AI implication. You'll be able to surf the internet, save a lot of files and video. The AI feature will be used in games to make it seems like PvE players are playing against human minded enemy bots, this will mainly be highlighted in fighting games and sports. The ray-tracing will become easier to handle, or at least easier until the developers push the envelope again, and force games to once again play at 30fps, as they seem to prefer that over high frame rates with less fidelity. And both will either be borderline or over $1,000 after it's announced sometime in 2026.

Could be. But if we assume for the sake of argument that this prediction is true, then it just goes to show that the new "defining" features won't be anything I really care about. Just a higher base performance boost.

@atheistpreacher: Playstation engagement is at an all time high yet half of users are on last gen, really how much better is Fortnite on PS5? And the PS5 is much better baseline tech over the PS4 it'll have the same problem ten fold, what defining features could you put in a potential PS6 when people might not ever switch.

Seems to me like Sony really wants to go back to the old days when their brand really meant something. They were *the* premium brand of electronics and they knew it, so they charged what they knew they could get away with for their A/V equipment. And not only is this pro model 700 USDs, but you have to spend even more to bring it to the capability of the $500 model from 4 years ago to read discs.

I regretted my PS4 Pro purchase, I won't be making the same mistake now...and this is coming from someone who already does have a really nice LG OLED 120hz TV where I could probably notice the differences. Hell, I barely play my existing PS5 as it is, but I'm happy with its performance thus far.

As someone who was willing to pay 600 us dollars for ps 3 just to play MGS4 (But only made the purchase when it was a lot cheaper in 2014.), I dare say that the 700 bucks price tag plus the lack of exclusive library really make a deadly cocktail here.