Games Inbox: Blaming Xbox for the PS5 Pro price, Switch 2 in September, and PS6 price worries-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

PS5 Pro – competent competition is important (Sony)

The Thursday letters page still can’t quite believe the price of the PS5 Pro, as one reader compares the situation to the Sega Saturn.

To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk

No competition
The reveal of the PS5 Pro and its price relays to me my worst fears. About a future in the console industry where Microsoft withdraws from the console market, leaving Sony and potentially someone like Apple to inflate the prices. I never thought it would cost that much, incredible really.

I remember years ago my brother buying Xbox 360 new in the shops with three games for £200 and saying he could not believe the price and what a bargain it was. It was and still is a great console but how times are changing,

Personally, I’m content with my Xbox Series X graphically, etc. I don’t need any more power. But hey, if people want a PS5 Pro and have the cash, go for it. After all, mobile phones cost more, don’t they? And the PS5 Pro is a luxury item. And I expect PlayStation 5 owners may just trade it to get the Pro. So expect a lot more used PlayStation 5 consoles in the shops.
icelticghost

Target market
I’m someone who’s absolutely the target market for a PS5 Pro – I’ve usually owned all three consoles each generation, but starting a family meant I stuck with my trusty Switch and skipped the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. During lockdown I gave into FOMO and decided to reinvest the money from my train season ticket on a PlayStation 5, but the shortages pushed me reluctantly towards an Xbox Series X instead.

Turns out I’m not that interested in Microsoft’s first party output this generation, and now they’re apparently going multiformat anyway I’m absolutely open to getting a PlayStation 5 for the Sony exclusives. But £700 is absolutely insane. Who has that kind of disposable income these days? I certainly don’t. And I want a disc drive, which makes it £800.

Oh, and I suppose I’ll need a game to play on it and a stand would be nice, so suddenly I’m looking at close to a grand. I’m trying to imagine explaining to my family that I’ve just spent £1,000 to play Astro Bot rather than all the many, many better things I could have done with the money. Utter madness! At least the PlayStation 6 is a long way away, right…?
Nic Martin

GC: Ah, about that…

Open goal
The current state of Sony and Microsoft makes me think that if I was in charge of Nintendo, I would do a snap reveal of the Switch 2 now.

There is such a storm of negativity surrounding both Sony and Microsoft currently that they could and should swoop in with their big reveal.

Sure, it may have a slightly negative impact on sales of their current hardware, but the groundswell of positivity and support that they would get cannot be underestimated and the savings in the ‘free’ marketing as a result would run into millions of pounds worth of free publicly.

Let’s be honest, everyone knows the Switch 2 is coming and the kids of any parent planning to buy the current model for Christmas will be ensuring that the Switch 2 is on their radar, alongside backwards compatibility, will keep the strong software sales buoyant and strong, so they have very little to lose.

Crazy times for crazy folks… who would have ever seen this coming?
Geoff

GC: There continue to be rumours of a September reveal, despite that seeming, at first, to be an unlikely move by Nintendo.

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Say no to Pro
I still haven’t made the jump into this latest generation of games consoles, mainly because I missed a lot of PlayStation 4 games at their time of release and have been playing catch-up. The other reason being games being released cross-gen. I have played and enjoyed God Of War Ragnarök, Horizon Forbidden West, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, etc. all on my 10-year-old PlayStation 4, purely because I could.

As I am now nearing the stage to finally jump into this gen, as there’s finally a handful of exclusive games that will justify it for me, I thought I would hang fire and wait to see what the PS5 Pro was going to offer with the intention of maybe buying it. I had visions of it coming in at a max £600 (disc drive included) but that was sure blown out the water. Now all of a sudden the PS5 Slim looks a bit of a bargain without Sony having to reduce the price. The cynic in me thinks this was Sonys plan all along.

Count me out for the PS5 Pro but will still buy a PlayStation 5 and hope for a Black Friday deal.
Ryan

To choose love by another’s eye
So as a Shakesperean tragedy has fallen, so has my indescribable faith in Sony. I am still amazed at the £700 price tag. I am confounded at exactly how any salesperson could sell me a reason on why I would or should ever entertain the idea of spending this money on a system that would seek only to coat me in feelings of loathing and regret.

Where shall I begin this fable? A disc drive is emboldened, by the flames of invisibility. A vertical stand is nowhere to be seen. A magnifying glass may not even be enough. My gaze falls upon Ellie Williams, as she was seen during my first playthrough of The Last Of Us Part 2 and she seems much the same.

But this is a £700 console. Surely Ratchet can look 5% furrier and Peter Parker’s suit can look 2% redder? I am afraid, I must express my divine gratitude to Sony. For delivering me a five course meal of insipid disappointment. As Shakespeare once did write. The course of true love never did run smooth. So does the course of Sony’s descent, into greed and monopoly has yet only begun.
Shahzaib Sadiq

Understandably ridiculous
I think if you look at the component upgrades from PlayStation 5 to PS5 Pro – doubling the capacity of the SSD, increasing the power of the GPU, and adding hardware support for the PSSR – as well as the current state of the world (with electronics getting more expensive generally, due to raw material scarcity) then you can see where the £699 RRP for PS5 Pro comes from.

But then the question becomes, is it worth launching comfortably the most expensive console ever for a fairly marginal gain in performance? And is there, in practice, a market for that console even among enthusiasts?

I’d wager that the most frame rate and resolution obsessed gamers aren’t predominantly console focussed, and while high-end PC gamers might not think twice about spending £600+ on a new GPU they’re probably not going to be tempted by a £699 black box system with no potential for upgrading in the future and a fairly limited selection of console exclusive games (can only think of Spider-Man 2 and Astro Bot that aren’t already on PC?).

I think Sony expect it to be a niche product, but the price vs. performance ratio, reasonable* though it may be, given the component costs, might turn it into a very niche product.
Magnumstache
*Not including the stand free for free is moronic.

GC: To paraphrase Ian Malcom, Sony was so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Old-fashioned arrogance
Much like the rest of the gaming community, I can’t believe the price of the PS5 Pro. Of course, it is the definition of a luxury item – with its main features being almost imperceptible improvements to frame rates, ray-tracing, and resolutions (including of older games with its new AI upscaling tech) – but £699.99 is a truly astonishing price.

Upon reflection, the even bigger surprise is the price differences across regions and what these suggest Sony’s perceptions are of their customer base.

$699.99 becomes £699.99 or €799.99, which is an obscene mark-up for what I believe are two of PlayStation 5’s strongest-selling regions. Similarly, the disc drive sells for $79 but £99 and €99.

Sony must think its UK and European fans will pay over the odds for the chance to play moderately improved old or third party games (remember, there are no upcoming first party PlayStation 5 games with a release date). While they can’t risk upsetting their American audience and pushing them to their home console, the Xbox.

I have no interest in the PS5 Pro – I’m actually debating selling my PlayStation 5 because there haven’t been any exclusives that have excited me this generation and there are none announced – but I hope the wider community vote with their wallets, particularly in UK and Europe, because this PS5 Pro launch smacks of the arrogance of Sony’s PlayStation 3 launch.

And to announce this new console iteration with no new games to show it off is triply shocking!
Hubert

Time is a flat circle
I’m having the strangest déjà vu of E3 of 1995, when Sony was releasing the original PlayStation vs. the launch of the Sega Saturn. All it took was the head of Sony in America to take the stage and say ‘$299’ and leave, to point out that the PlayStation was $100 cheaper than the Saturn.

Nintendo needs to do exactly the same thing when they reveal the price of the Switch 2 in comparison to the PS5 Pro.
Mr Kiwi

Fear the future
So, cards on the table, I never bought a PS4 Pro.

I really wanted to get one but it was a choice between waiting for what was then Project Scorpio or the PS4 Pro and I felt at the time (and I feel I made the right decision ) that the PS4 Pro wasn’t a significant enough upgrade to my PlayStation 4 and yet the Xbox One was in serious need of a boost to play games properly, so was getting my money.

PS5 Pro seems to be in the same position, only a modest upgrade on a machine that, quite frankly, still hasn’t reached its full potential.

Then there is the price, Sony showing why we need Microsoft to be stronger and a real alternative. Now I have no knowledge of the profit margin this machine has… however I’m going to assume the US price gives them at least a $100 profit.

$699 in the US
$850 in Japan ($770 excluding tax)
$880 in Europe ($765 excluding tax)
$915 in the UK ($762 excluding tax)

It does seem to be them upping the price in their strongest markets just because they can. Although something we are used to from all console brands.

Sony have now released three products:

PlayStation Portal – reasonably priced and under the correct conditions a fantastic device (very niche market).

PlayStation VR2 – by all accounts a fantastic piece of hardware, released at a ludicrous price with a complete wasteland of software support from Sony and lacking the ability to play my existing PlayStation VR1 library.

And now the PS5 Pro which seems to have learnt nothing from the PlayStation VR2 launch or the PS4 Pro. We have a machine that is released with no games and is better, but not close to being an essential upgrade, it’s not even giving you the leap that PS4 Pro did where, with checkerboarding, you went from HD to a reasonably-close-to-4K image.

The Rachet & Clank performance mode vs. PS5 Pro was a ‘Yeah, I guess I can see the difference’ comparison, but the PlayStation 5 version still doesn’t look shabby.

We have a market where some people are perfectly happy with Xbox Series S levels of visuals, (which incidentally, can sometime be amazingly good for such a cheap machine). So here we have a very expensive premium for something where the differences in motion are so negligible to the average gamer that it will be hard for them to notice or care about.

I don’t often want a product to fail, but if this is pointing to the vision Sony has of the future and how consoles are sold to us then I don’t want them to be rewarded. I don’t want the legacy of this machine to be the end of affordable consoles.
irve77 (gamertag/PSN ID)

Inbox also-rans
Did GC notice Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 wasn’t on the PS5 Pro enhancement list? Is that Microsoft enforcing a parity clause? I find its absence interesting. Maybe Sony are not allowed to advertise it?
Si

GC: We wouldn’t draw any conclusions yet, as there’s currently only one game (Assassin’s Creed: Shadows) on the list of enhanced titles that isn’t already out.

I wonder how many letters we shall be reading come November, from the wealthier GC readers who will have purchased a PS5 Pro, talking about buttery smooth frames per second and how they are playing PlayStation 5 titles the way they were always intended to be played.
Adams6Legend

I found the PS5 Pro reveal to be very motivational. I mean, if Sony has the stones to release a £700 console that they don’t seem to be making any games for, then I can negotiate a raise at work or ask out that girl I like.
ANON

So much great commentary on the PS5 Pro already, so I’ll keep this brief: PS5 Pro: The emperor’s new clothes edition.
Rob

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