‘With the price of PS5 Pro, I have never felt so out-of-touch with Sony’

PS5 Pro graphic — An expensive upgrade (Sony)

A Reader’s Feature hears from a very frustrated PlayStation fan, who feels he’s been priced out of the ecosystem by the new PS5 Pro.

I’ve had a few days to simmer over the PS5 Pro reveal and I have to say it’s alarming the number of people that are just ‘okay’ with the thing being priced at £800 with a disc drive.

The hardware itself looks good so far, and the idea that you can play PlayStation 5 games in a higher fidelity and, importantly, at a more consistent 60fps, is not only massively desirable but also feels fairly important at this stage that it has been recognised. Possibly a good thing moving forward.

Do I want one? Absolutely! If I could afford it, then I would be ordering it in a heartbeat. But at £800 I am locked out massively on price.

Gaming is a luxury or enthusiast hobby at the best of times, with a near £500 entry point, £60-70 games, expensive annual subs for basic functionality like online play, a multitude of accessories such as controllers and headsets etc. But this feels like a massive slap in the face. £800 is simply not affordable for an average consumer, even one deeply invested in the ecosystem.

Typically, I would consider myself a fairly core customer of the PlayStation ecosystem. Got the console at launch; a selection of accessories, including some premium; a mixture of physical and digital purchasing, I subscribe annually to their membership (Essential, but still). You might think I’m exactly the kind of person the Pro is for, right?

Wrong.

Sony has now drawn a line in the sand and told me that I am not really a good enough customer within their ecosystem, because I am not privileged enough to pony up for their iterative upgraded model of the PlayStation 5.

Last generation, the PS4 Pro offered largely the same benefits that the PS5 Pro is pitching – arguably more if you factor in the 4K compatibility – at a price that was accessible to everybody. Even the Xbox One X, at its higher price tag, wasn’t completely unrealistic, and it offered a similar faux bleeding edge approach to marketing.

The specific omission of the disc drive is also a signifier of future intent. You might think the Pro model was the be-all and end-all device that had all functionality? Nope. Removing the drive, making it an additive purchase, is another way to rip off the consumer, as well as trying to drive faster into the all-digital future that they want. The reality of next gen not having a disc drive has never been closer.

One final concern I have: future game reveals. It is fair to assume that from this point forward, all first party games revealed will be running at their highest possible fidelity on PS5 Pro, and the PlayStation 5 will become the second fiddle due to the ‘choppy’ gameplay, as per Mark Cerny’s comments.

Will the games still run fine? Yeah, no doubt. Yet there will always be that nagging carrot dangling overhead, knowing that the games will only ever look that good if you have the unaffordable-for-many high-end product in the range. This is the point that Sony becomes completely and undeniably out of touch with the consumer base.

Ultimately, my already wavering faith in Sony as a company has now pretty much hit rock bottom. I know the corporation doesn’t care about me individually, but there must be a huge subsection of the PlayStation 5 consumer base in a similar position to me and are now feeling a bit bewildered at the decision to just overlook them altogether and make them feel completely irrelevant.

By reader Ben