Playstation 5 Pro

https://blog.playstation.com/2024/09/10/welcome-playstation-5-pro-the-most-visually-impressive-way-to-play-games-on-playstation/

by jsheard • 2 years ago

85 181 2 years ago

blog.playstation.com

Rinzler89• 2 years ago

Will it play Concord?

talldayo4• 2 years ago

0 PT compatibility, either. Guess there's still a reason to keep the PS4 around a little while longer, eh?

Honestly speaking though, I don't "get" Sony like I "get" Microsoft and Nintendo's business strategy. This feels like the PS3 launch all over again, a big console with a never-before-seen price tag, with few headline features besides "graphics". It appeals to the core fanbase, and absolutely nobody else. It's like Sony thinks they have Nintendo-tier market control.

I dunno, maybe they're leading up to some big software change that will really wow their users. It's a good day to be an offline PC gamer though (especially if you want to catch up on the state of Bloodborne emulation).

dangus9• 2 years ago

I’m actually amazed that it’s now Nintendo that is the only console manufacturer with a sane strategy.

Their strategy is simple: affordable portable console for the whole family with exclusive access to a wide library of acclaimed first-party titles. They essentially have zero competitors besides relatively obscure retro handhelds from China that are too difficult to use for the average person.

But Sony’s strategy is seems to be basically begging their users to ditch their PS5 for a PC. Go play our games on PC, here’s a Pro console that costs as much as a new PC or GPU upgrade.

At least Microsoft’s strategy to own a large chunk of the AAA software market makes some level of sense in a world where they see their console hardware possibly exiting the market.

1970-01-01• 2 years ago

Still has shitty backwards compatibility. Sony thrives on subscriptions. Vote with your wallet.

johnnyanmac17• 2 years ago

Not entirely convinced they do, but I unsubscribed already after the price hike and different divisions of tiers.

dangus9• 2 years ago

It is interesting but not surprising that it’s disc-optional with no pre-installed disc drive option available.

Otherwise, in terms of specs and price, I am somewhat amazed that the console market is clinging on to life at this point. The PS5/Series generation pushed me to PC and I’m really not understanding the appeal of the consoles anymore beyond the convenience of not needing to do assembly.

The consoles are just giving you hardware that PCs already had years ago and isn’t even really beating it on price all that well.

This thing is $700 and you’ll end up with a better system if you build a new PC with a $500 graphics card at about $1000 total build cost. And then you have way more flexibility overall and a much larger game library.

RandomLensman• 2 years ago

Convenience value: Stable platform, fast to start, nothing much do or address other than play.

gjsman-10005• 2 years ago

Simple, there are two markets:

- People who know about and build computers

- People who want to play games

There's some common overlap; but there are a lot of people who do not overlap. As long as that is the case, PlayStation will always have a market.

Also, I'm glad for this; the PC is not a completely stable platform. I remember playing games with NVIDIA PhysX from about a decade and a half ago, and the physics are just ever so slightly broken and off (to the point some levels are unbeatable).

pawelduda4• 2 years ago

And many more bluescreens/crashes/reboots from my experience. Godspeed if you aren't into tinkering and figuring out why your setup that worked yesterday is broken today. I moved from mainly PS5 to a beefy PC and the amount of troubleshooting you have to do is staggering. This kind of things never happened to me in years of playing on a console.

MichaelZuo4• 2 years ago

Yeah, gaming on a self built PC only makes sense if your time is worth ~$0.

simion314• 2 years ago

An argument is that Consoles are easier and safer to give to a child, they can't mess things up and Sony is moderating the online chat.

I do not recommend it , from my experience the moderation is a blackbox, I would get warrningss for my son;s activity with no clue what was wrong, some bullshit like it might have been one of the things in this list of bad things. Then they force you to buy a sbuscription to access online features/multiplayer and if they ban you without any right to appeal they will not return your money for the services they will not longer give you.

So fck subscriptions, fck moderation without transparency and without right to appeal and talk with a human. And also fck Sony for killing online features because are to lazy to keep a few server code safe, lazy and greedy bastards.

dangus9• 2 years ago

Let’s not forget that the target market for game consoles outside of Nintendo is ~40 year olds.

I think there’s a good reason Sony is themselves shifting toward the PC.

kstrauser2• 2 years ago

I spend all day making computers yield to my will. I like doing this. I enjoy it. But when I'm done with my work day, it's awfully nice to sit on the couch, pick up a PS5 controller, and start playing something that requires approximately 0 maintenance.

I couldn't care less about specs. I want games to look Good Enough. PC games might look slightly nicer, or perhaps not, given the enormous variety of configurations they have to support, but not so much nicer that I'm willing to be bothered with it. I'm totally capable of building a PC and going to ridiculous lengths to optimize it. I just don't want to anymore.

yesimahuman5• 2 years ago

Lot of downvoting for having a different opinion in this thread. So people disagree with you and think that warrants a downvote? That's counter to the HN ethos.

I agree with you, don't need to buy new 2024 PC components to have a great gaming PC, that seems to be the counter argument here which just isn't the case

johnnyanmac17• 2 years ago

Downvotes for being outright unaware of the GPU market. If you can build me a PS5 equivalent PC build for $500 I'll take you up on that. Cheapest 3080 I could find used was $600 by itself (and that's probably a GPU already ground to dust from mining).

don't need to buy new 2024 PC components to have a great gaming PC

No, you don't. But if you want to compare a PC to a console, you should use equivalent specs. People who just want a convinient way to play games (not AAA games) can pick up a steam deck for $200-300 and be set for life. But that's not who Sony is targeting.

johnnyanmac17• 2 years ago

I’m really not understanding the appeal of the consoles anymore beyond the convenience of not needing to do assembly...and isn’t even really beating it on price all that well.

It's a bit of the opposite direction for me. Crypto and now AI ruined the idea of a gaming PC being cheaper than a console. 3080's by themselves (which is what a $500 PS5 uses) can still go for $800 by itself on the used market. The gen 9 consoles are the cheapest way to buy 2020's tech right now.

thirdsun• 2 years ago

I doubt the non-Pro PS5 is anywhere close to the RTX3080's performance.

jsheard2• 2 years ago

$700 and it doesn't even come with an optical drive, oof. The optical upgrade kit for the digital-only PS5 Slim is $80, so the Pro is probably going to be closer to $800 in practice unless you're already all-in on digital.

gjsman-10005• 2 years ago

The disc drive is basically useless anyway from a long-term perspective (I don't say "preservation" because that's a farcical argument); because even on the bundled versions, it requires an internet connection to "activate" it. This also needs to be repeated when a user signs out or signs in as someone else.

cassianoleal2• 2 years ago

On the other hand, you can sell a physical copy of a game you're not interested anymore. You can potentially buy another used game for the same money you got from the sales. Keep repeating and in theory you could play infinite games for the price of 1.

geerlingguy• 2 years ago

No optical drive, and the vertical stand is also sold separately!

StrLght• 2 years ago

Asking this as a PC gamer who went fully digital ~15 years ago: why are optical drives such a big deal, is that because of buying/selling used games?

jsheard2• 2 years ago

Partly due to used games, but even when buying new it's often cheaper to buy physical than digital due to retailers undercutting each other, while the digital store strictly adheres to MSRP until the game has been out for a while.

gjsman-10005• 2 years ago

I refuse to have any business with digital only purchases; for a few reasons:

1. Just like movies, you don't own anything. Revocation can occur at any time.

2. More likely than movies, you might find your game patched to add or remove content you do not want.

3. You can't give your games to the next generation. Which matters a lot when your exposure to gaming started from NES and Atari hand-me-downs.

4. Every game you purchase is chained to just yourself. Which is actually stupidly selfish when you have a large extended family also interested in games. The Switch is a hit for borrowing back and forth from a large network of relatives and friends (and, if Nintendo's reading this and questioning the resale market - this has caused a lot of games to get bought that wouldn't have).

5. If you have a large NES collection, there will be someone interested in paying for it. If you have a large Switch collection, there will be someone interested in paying for it. Physical games have some asset value, and it can be thousands of dollars for larger collections. Digital games have zero value.

Hamuko• 2 years ago

The PlayStation Store is a monopoly on the PS5, so there's no price competition there.

I compared the prices of disc releases and digital releases on the PS5 in early 2023 and you could often get the physical disc release for cheaper than the digital:

Final Fantasy XVI (PS5): 65€ disc / 80€ digital. Hogwarts Legacy (PS5): 59€ disc / 75€ digital. Diablo IV (PS5): 70€ disc / 80€ digital. Resident Evil 4 (PS5): 60€ disc / 70€ digital.

prmoustache4• 2 years ago

I don't know about optical drives but I bought ~75% of my switch games as used cartridge.

I think a lot of people would stop buying consoles if they couldn't sell the games they have finished or do not like anymore to fund the purchase of other games.

kstrauser2• 2 years ago

Sony released this tutorial years ago in response to Microsoft making it harder to share Xbox games with your friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA

That's lived in my head since.

pengaru• 2 years ago

In 40 years none of your digital only assets are going to work, if still accessible to you at all.

I played Excitebike [0] on a friend's childhood NES and CRT TV while visiting over Thanksgiving. All we had to do was blow the dust off the cartridge, and we were living in 1984 again. Having physical copies makes this scenario far more likely to succeed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitebike

paxys7• 2 years ago

Digital works on PC because there is competition. There are dozens of stores you can buy from, and the developer or publisher can also just sell games directly. On consoles Sony & Microsoft have a monopoly on distribution. So being able to buy/sell/borrow used disks is a huge money saver.

bane2• 2 years ago

The situation for PC gamers is somewhat different than for console gamers. There's certain built in expectations in the market for compatibility across generations, long-term licensing, and free network services that just don't really exist in the console market. As a result it feels like you "own" games more with Steam and other similar services, while on consoles there is a history of closing down stores, and people simply losing access to purchased games.

Physical media gives the impression at least to console gamers that they "own" the game for the long term and the loss of a digital storefront won't impact them (even if it's not always true).

EasyMark• 2 years ago

I think it’s due to “used games” market about 80%. Some people just like having physical media that can’t be taken away from them; others don’t care and are through with the game for a lifetime after they beat it/grow weary of it. I personally have tons of old games and kind of stopped buying new stuff after PS4. One day you’ll go to download “Gulliver’s Golden Adventure” for nostalgia and Steam will tell you to “fuck off, that game is gone”, but that won’t happen if you have it on vinyl

ajmurmann• 2 years ago

I stopped buying physical years ago when Amazon got rid of their 20%(?) pre-order discounts. However, I'd not trade my PS5 for a drive-less PS5 Pro, even if it was for free. Most of my PS4 games are on disc and I couldn't play them anymore. If Sony were to allow me to insert the disc and get the games added to my digital library (many platforms did this for Blu-Ray movies), I'd reconsider. But in the meantime I am tied to my disc drive

synicalx• 2 years ago

On PC you have your choice of marketplaces so it's somewhat less of an issue. On console you're locked into just the one marketplace with digital-only consoles, so if Sony wants to charge $100 for a game then that's the price. Once you've paid the $100 it's also tied to your account which is not necessarily always guaranteed to exist or be accessible, and is non-transferable.

Whereas with a disk you can pay substantially less due to your choice of competitive retailers (in my region Space Marine 2 is $79 at some retailers or $109 from Sony), buy secondhand for older titles (most of my library is secondhand), and resell or trade-in games when you're finished with them. And of course it's not tied to an ephemeral account, so you will always have access to the titles you've purchased.

Also for my use case, my PS5 doubles as a Blu-Ray player which is worth a good $100-200 just by itself.

johnnyanmac17• 2 years ago

Mostly because I simply like having a collection to look at. It's like comparing a small library to a list of ebooks on Kindle.

But yes, other obvious benefits include sharability, resellability (especially these days. So many childhood favorites sell for 200+ dollars for some reason), a perhaps false sense of preservation (I know there are some icky server issues on gen 7+ consoles, even for single player games), and simply liking the feel of a case and disc.

Fire-Dragon-DoL2• 2 years ago

We don't have the option for physical on pc, but it's the only way to "own" a videogame. Even steam is at risk. If Gabe dies, bad stuff will happen.

phonon• 2 years ago

Storage went up from 825 GB to 2 TB though....

paxys7• 2 years ago

You are basically paying $250 extra for the GPU.

Narishma3• 2 years ago

And the SSD.

davexunit• 2 years ago

Yeah... I was cautiously excited for the PS5 pro as I don't have a PS5 yet, but this announcement was disappointing. Long live the PS2, I say.

alexruf• 2 years ago

I'm shocked. 90% of my game library is physical. So if the console is priced at 799 € without a disc drive, and the drive costs an additional 149 €, that totals 948 € if I want to continue playing my existing disc collection. No, thanks!

esaym• 2 years ago

retail price (MSRP) of $699.99 USD

dharbin• 2 years ago

"Pro" is a funny qualifier for a game console. The definition has morphed from "for professionals" to "more expensive" or "more capable."

tropicalfruit2• 2 years ago

i realised recently that the transition to HD made everything look and sound the same to me. unlike the distinctive eras of the 90s, 80s, 70s...so on.

and now with realistic graphics, even games are starting to all look the same to me. i feel that the limitation born art and era-specific traits of the pre-HD era have been lost.

i just dont feel anything looking at these new games. but then i'm not young anymore.

WillAdams2• 2 years ago

Well, could I interest you in a Nintendo Switch?

Switch games still have markedly diverse graphic styles (and _great_ art direction).

evilkorn• 2 years ago

Only because they are underpowered with old hardware. Just overclocking gives better performance but still dips below 60fps on first party titles. But they had to make those sacrifices because it's a portable console first with a tv dock. Nintendo always had slowdowns from the beginning with nes, SNES, N64. But these days it's just not acceptable to have those kinds of performance issues.

tropicalfruit2• 2 years ago

one of the issues...i think. if you make a game now, it has to scale to different resolutions for different displays.

so to do that cheaply you need to use some kind of vector art. which gives everything this kind of vector smoothness which eliminates some of the roughness which gives character and charm.

but i agree that the switch is the closest remaining thing to that past era.

whiterknight• 2 years ago

It’s actually just because they all use unreal.

4k also requires upscaling or minimizing work per pixel, which encourages everyone to use similar methods.

johnnyanmac17• 2 years ago

To be fair, most games showcased were first party. And I believe they each used some proprietary engine.

FF7 and Hogwarts do both use Unreal, yes.

deadly_penguin3• 2 years ago

Lots of PS2 games look similar, too with lots of games with colour palettes being variations on the theme of brown. So I'm not sure it's a new thing, but I do get what you mean when you see the "Triple AAAAAAAAAAA" game of the day.

pixelatedindex2• 2 years ago

$700 and no disc drive? Yikes. I guess it makes sense when compared to the PS4 lineup cost wise, but usually when they launch the slims it drops the price to some degree. Doesn’t seem to be the case here.

himinlomax• 2 years ago

I haven't had a disc drive in any of my PC for a decade. I bought a USB DVD reader just in case, it's somewhere collecting dust — I've never used it. Why do you want one in a console?

darkwizard422• 2 years ago

Used games + retailers regularly sell games for much cheaper than the online store (which is a monopoly by PS/Xbox)

_a_a_a_• 2 years ago

I've never owned a games console so I don't know, but I thought they could be used to play DVD films. It makes perfect sense as part of their function. ISTM anyway.

FMecha6• 2 years ago

PC games are also for most part digital-only nowadays.

pixelatedindex2• 2 years ago

Well for one, it is a pretty good Blu-Ray player.

Another reason I like it is because I prefer to have my console games on a disc, this way I can share it with friends and I don’t have to be at the mercy of people like Sony who is not afraid to remove access to something you paid for.

EnergyAmy• 2 years ago

I can buy PC games from gog.com and get something that will work in 20 years. Consoles don't have an equivalent DRM-free store like that, but discs can achieve that.

angry_moose2• 2 years ago

PS5 Slim came out last year for $499 (same hardware, smaller footprint).

This is a hardware refresh, like the PS4 Pro.

Narishma3• 2 years ago

They can't drop the price because they can't shrink the chips anymore like they used to do.

samier-trellis• 2 years ago

Pro?

indy• 2 years ago

It's an abbreviation of "proctology"

ChainOfFools• 2 years ago

How strange is it that this console is to be priced considerably higher in its home market than it is in the US.

Either that or Sony is hinting that they expect the yen to crash dramatically against the dollar (from 142:1 over 170:1) between now and the end of the year.

Narishma3• 2 years ago

They recently increased the price of the PS5 in Japan, presumably due to the weak yen.

_--__--__• 2 years ago

The recent price increase was directly because of demand to import PS5s from Japan to China after the release of the Wukong game. I'm not sure exactly why, but importing Japanese consoles was cheaper than buying whichever ones were left in China.

pawelduda4• 2 years ago

A lot of people seem to be unhappy with the price? Especially if you want to have disc drive. As someone who played through many of current gen titles already, I don't see the appeal. Might be worth it still if you already own a PS5 that you can trade in. Shame there's no comparison on how PSSR differs from DLSS/FSR.

kmlx• 2 years ago

the appeal will probably come from gta6.

not sure if it helps anyone here, but: $700 is $575 in 2020 money

FMecha6• 2 years ago

PS5 Slim trade-in value is already tanking because of the PS5 Pro, though [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/Jebailey/status/1833540904797528080

yesimahuman5• 2 years ago

Beyond the exclusives, if you're willing to spend this much for a playstation why not just spend a bit more for a nice PC? I have the PS5 but barely play it since the gaming experience on PC is just better and you have a lot more selection and can upgrade it piece by piece as needed over the years, which I'm finding I rarely need to do.

sjnonweb• 2 years ago

A similar performing 4070ti alone will cost $750, and thats just gpu. Including cpu, memory, storage it will be more than $1500.

yesimahuman5• 2 years ago

Thanks for the downvotes for pointing out that, as part of the target market for this product, I scratch my head a bit as it touches more in the PC territory than cheaper consoles did in the past. If you bought both this and the PS5 you're already at ~$1200, and a great PC build can be had for close to that. I think it's totally legitimate to point out this starts to encroach on the pc's territory.

pier25• 2 years ago

I own both PC and consoles for gaming. A console still is way more convenient to play in a big tv. And HDR support is also better. Also plenty of games are terribly optimized on PC.

deadly_penguin3• 2 years ago

our most advanced and innovative console hardware to date.

This is a bit hyperbolic - there's no way a PS5 iteration is more innovative than the hardware in the PS3 or even 2, unless it suddenly stopped being an AMD box with a slightly funky system architecture.

rcarmo2• 2 years ago

That sentence (from Sony) read too much like an Apple keynote prompt.

dmix• 2 years ago

Never understood why people get upset at generic marketing lines in press release.

nerdjon6• 2 years ago

This has been such a weird generation of consoles from a price standpoint but I know a lot of that is just due to pricing of things being weird anyways.

This is expensive, I am struggling to really justify it at the moment (and I have a 4090 in my PC so it isn't some thoughts about price or power or whatever). Games right now are just not really struggling. Last time around these pro consoles came out we were running up against the limits of the hardware at that time. That isn't the case yet.

It will be interesting to see what Xbox comes out with, the timeline for this coming out is pretty quick. So unless xbox was just about to announce something not sure how realistically they will have an answer to this

darkwizard422• 2 years ago

Is this expensive because of the components or because you feel systems were priced lower in the past and this is a small upgrade?

I think for the number of hours people put into it gaming systems are actually quite cheap. You get to have them functioning for 5-10 years with 100s of hours played. On a per hour level, it provides massive amount of entertainment.

Now, if you already have a strong PC (which you allude to) and game on that, your ROI is probably going to be a lot lower.

nerdjon6• 2 years ago

I see it as expensive mostly because we have not had any drop in price this generation.

For example, take last generation. The Xbox One launched at (all USD) $500, $400 without Kinect once that was an option. PS4 launched at $400. The PS4 Pro also later launched at $400, The xbox One X launched at $500.

This is a $200-$280 (including adding the drive) jump in price and the base model is still the same price or more expensive in some places than it was at launch.

On the flip side, I also do worry about what exactly we are seeing from Sony again. We know that Sony can get cocky when they are on top (See PS3, cross play, etc) and make decisions that are not good for gamers. I worry this is a sign that they are going that way again.

pjmlp7• 2 years ago

XBox is in a strange position, there are rumours of a next generation console, but I don't believe it matters.

Microsoft has been behaving as if XBox has become an umbrella brand for Microsoft Game Studios, after ABK acquisition.

They are going the way of SEGA, regardless how much Phil Spencer says they aren't.

nerdjon6• 2 years ago

They are in a strange position, but I don't think they are going the way of Sega right now. The market is very different now than it was at that time.

We are applying the status quo as the only possible way to run game consoles when that doesn't have to be true. AMD and Nvidia compete just fine on the merits of their hardware alone without exclusive games.

Even Sony is realizing that they can't only publish on their own consoles. What Microsoft is doing now with Playstation they have already been doing for quite some time already with their games launching day one also on PC.

We also can't ignore that the need for the console is changing with things like xcloud (which runs Xbox hardware on blades, so it gives them incentive to continue making xbox hardware that can both ship as a home console and in blades). xCloud you can even use without any extra hardware (other than a controller) right on your TV with Samsung.

Obviously xCloud isn't going to be the solution for everyone. But we can't apply how things previously worked to how Xbox is trying to just have a different business model. And it isn't anything new with the ABK acquisition. It is continuing what they have already been doing.

mrweasel2• 2 years ago

I'm getting really tired of this "Pro" bullshit. The issue with the PlayStation 5 isn't the bloody specs, it the f-ing price. The PlayStation 5 Slim is $600 already, we don't need a $700 one (which it won't be, because that is US pricing and probably not including tax).

Sony needs a $350 model, not this Pro nonsense. Who is the target audience for this?

pryelluw• 2 years ago

Agreed. I’m still rocking the ps4 and enjoying its vast library of solid games. PS5 lacks games and is expensive.

They should have a $350 model with optical drive and one remote. Sell it on a plastic shopping bag for all I care.

deadly_penguin3• 2 years ago

I'd be much more impressed if they released one that was the same size as the PS2 slim; that might, maybe, come close to being worth the price.

mrweasel2• 2 years ago

It would still be a bit to pricy for me, but I can see the logic. Either get the old model, at a reduced price, or get the new slimmer version at the old price. I think many would take the new model in that case, while some of those who have been waiting for the price to drop would pick up the old model at the reduced price.

Sakos3• 2 years ago

I thought there would be price drops with the Pro being launched. Should've seen the writing on the wall that this is just a more expensive SKU to sell alongside the existing ones.

paulmd4• 2 years ago

Microsoft was upfront that they didn’t think a mid-gen price cut was in the cards, so here’s the series s, it’s what we can do and we’ll do it right now, etc.

They were right and not only have prices not really come down, but in some ways they’ve increased.

The unfortunate consequences of a post-Moores law reality. Like yeah nothing is getting 2x better for the same price even every 3-4 years anymore. Your expectations based on past history will no longer hold true, and this has been clear for a number of years now.

You can’t make a gamer understand something when his wallet depends on him not understanding it. People have been in active denial for years, in ways that have crossed into objective denial of reality. The "AMD is just choosing to join NVIDIA and gouge!" stuff has been joined by "and sony is in on it too!" etc. Yes, corporations suck but the margins are not actually very fat here, this is just what it costs now.

iteratethis• 2 years ago

Not just post-Moores, it sometimes feels like a reversal.

Look at high-end gaming PCs. Monster-sized GPUs and cases. CPUs with stupendous requirements for cooling. Insane power draws. The prediction for next gen (5000 series): significantly larger power draw still.

Things are not getting smaller and faster, they're getting bigger and hotter and more power hungry.

johnnyanmac17• 2 years ago

Who is the target audience for this?

gamers who complain about 30fps on comments sections, apparently.

And in all fairness, Xbox tried the $350 gen 9 console... it apparently caused (and still causes) huge issues for development

pjmlp7• 2 years ago

Which is kind of silly, given the miriad of PC and Android devices some of the same studios also target.

So they manage some potato PCs as minimum requirements but not the Series S?

rcarmo2• 2 years ago

I suppose the "Ultra" model is going to come with either the optical drive or an even better chipset...

Seriously now, at $700 and at the pace Ryzen mini-PCs (with the 780m chipset) or new Alder Lake chips (with Xe2) are evolving, by next year you'll be able to build yourself a 4K Steam box running Bazzite.

(you can already spend that much and have a very good HD, maybe even 1440p gaming experience - I have a 680m iGPU machine I stream Steam games from, and it's pretty good for 1080p)

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

Are there side by side videos or something of how this is better than a plain old PS5?

cassianoleal2• 2 years ago

Yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu0NA6CnkjY

wmf• 2 years ago

The second video in the article.

prmoustache4• 2 years ago

What kind of work can I do with it?

deng• 2 years ago

Wow, the console is effectively 25% more expensive in Europe? That's crazy.

Yes, I'm aware of taxes, extended warranty and other requirements in the EU, but still. Usually, you had a simple 1:1 mapping $->EUR, which effectively is about 10% markup.

TiredOfLife2• 2 years ago

The taxes are about 20% in EU. And is included in advertised price. In us the tax is smaller and is not included in price.

ineedaj0b• 2 years ago

the euro is very weak. many different reasons for this

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

Most US jurisdictions have a 7%+ sales tax that is not included in the advertised price. And VAT in Eurozone is roughly 20%, included in the Eurozone price.

sergiotapia• 2 years ago

still no games unfortunately. :(

i had such a wonderful time with Demon's Souls - but the rest I just play on my pc with my rtx 4090. we need more console exclusives but the calculus does not make sense anymore i'm afraid. budgets has ballooned so much that games takes years to release, and release compromised. i wonder what the solution is. shorter more linear games? not everything has to be open world!

look at ghost runner 2, one of my favorite games of all time, linear, sharp, exciting!

johnnyanmac17• 2 years ago

I feel like Hawthorne's law is ruining this solution. Last of Us 2 and God of War are about as linear as you can get away with and those games aren't able to be cranked out in 2-3 years, even last generation. I have various solutions in mind, but nothing that would be well received

I think the practical consumer solution is to simply stop hyping around these AAA games and invest more in studios that do in fact make smaller scale games. They won't sell 10 million copies, but they also need much less to succeed. Your $5 is proportionately way more valuable to an indie than $70 is to Demons Souls.

egypturnash• 2 years ago

wake me up when there's a PS5 Pro Slim that only costs a couple hundred bucks, thanks, I'll be over on my couch with the Steam Deck

hs86• 2 years ago

This upgrade seems a bit one-sided.

Some badly optimized games are usually CPU limited, and this upgrade apparently will not improve on that.

I wouldn't be surprised if games like GTA 6 run at 30 fps on both PS5 and PS5 Pro, with some added effects and resolution for the Pro model.

paxys7• 2 years ago

I don't think people commenting here realize how expensive gaming GPUs have become. A top of the line RTX 4090 is upwards of $1700. A mid range card that can play the latest AAA games at a decent resolution and frame rate (say RTX 4070) is $600-700. And if you're building a PC you still need to buy everything else around the card.

Yes $700 is expensive for a console, but that's just what the market rate is now.

golergka• 2 years ago

Yes $700 is expensive for a console, but that's just what the market rate is now.

I remember buying PS3 at launch for $700.

angry_moose2• 2 years ago

In what currency? It was USD $499 (20GB) and $599 (60GB).

FMecha6• 2 years ago

Adjusted for inflation that PS3 is $1,100 now.

TiredOfLife2• 2 years ago

The base PS5 equivalent GPU is 2070 Super that goes for around 200$

paxys7• 2 years ago

And the base PS5 from 2020 goes for ~$300, but that's not the device we are talking about.

paulmd4• 2 years ago

are you seriously suggesting that sony put used pc hardware in their consoles? that's terrible even as a point of comparison.

johnnyanmac17• 2 years ago

I don't think people commenting here realize how expensive gaming GPUs have become

I do. But I also have a lovely PS5 base for $500. If we're hitting the 900 mark why not just go full premium and jump into PC gaming? PS5 is competing with itself and losing horribly.

It's also simply a disappointing move from a software standpoint. Their showcases were basically for existing first party games and Hogwarts Legacy (oh and I saw a brief glimpse at FF7 in the sizzle reel. Square "soon™" Enix, great assurance), with a vague promise of "future games" using PS5 pro tech. It feels like Playstation has barely took advantadge of current hardware (which was the biggest benefit of consoles, having one explicit spec with almost all resources dedicated to your game), so even a great showcase full of new and exciting games would have been a hard sell to upgrade.

Pay 2-300 more to get maybe 10-15 games playing better before PS6 rumors start? Why not just do the full jump to PC?

ukuina2• 2 years ago

The pricing feels like a direct response to Microsoft essentially exiting the console market.

nerdjon6• 2 years ago

Except Microsoft has said they have new Xbox hardware coming.

We really need to stop spreading this misinformation (and hyperbole) just because Microsoft is operating a different business model than Sony is.

I am not happy about the price either, but this generation has been weird with Microsoft and Sony not dropping their price and increasing prices in some locations. I doubt this has anything to do with Xbox.

pjmlp7• 2 years ago

That is whishful thinking, even if they release the magical console, it will tank, given their attitude of "You don't need a box to play XBox branded games", while putting their games everywhere there is a GPU.

I certainly don't care any longer about it beyond the XBox App on Windows.

ageitgey2• 2 years ago

I'm sure this will sell just fine, but in the history of consoles there has never been less incentive to upgrade. It just doesn't feel like the upgrade delivers anything tangible for the average person.

Many games I want to play these days barely take full advantage of the base PS5, let alone needing more hardware. A lot of cheaper titles aren't even bothering to take advantage of the PS5 over the PS4. There are some really stand-out PS5 titles like Ratchet and Clank that look amazing, but they are relatively few and far between and they don't really leave you wishing for "more power".

Sure, this will let you play some games at 8k instead of 4k. Or this will let you get more FPS in 4k. If that is enough to upgrade, great. But I bet 99% of people wouldn't even be able to tell the difference in most real world situations unless they were staring at the two systems side by side with magnifying glasses. There's just no big obvious difference in most games.

diggan• 2 years ago

But I bet 99% of people wouldn't even be able to tell the difference in most real world situations unless they were staring at the two systems side by side with magnifying glasses

I don't think this matters at all. The market of people who uses consoles + care about graphic fidelity / fps count are basically like the audiophile community today, eating up what the companies are pushing on them.

makerofthings• 2 years ago

I know a lot of console fanatics like that and they all like to keep games on disc, shunning digital. The new ps doesn't seem to have an optical drive so I'm really not sure who they're aiming this at.

paxys7• 2 years ago

I doubt they anyways expect the majority of existing PS5 owners to rush to upgrade. Mid cycle console releases are done for the enthusiast crowd and the holdovers from the last generation.

pawelduda4• 2 years ago

You are grossly overestimating what PS5 can do in regards of 4k, let alone 8k (which nowadays is used by very small percentage of enthusiasts). 4k native is not something most of the modern releases target on PS5, perhaps in some specific moments when the resolution is dynamic and not much is happening on the screen. Or if you're playing at a locked 30 FPS, which is a major tradeoff.

ageitgey2• 2 years ago

Not disagreeing with you that many heavy PS5 games rely on dynamic resolution to hit a good frame rate. And for some people, that's enough reason to upgrade. They want they best available no matter what.

But my point is that a holding a solid 4k vs dropping down from 4k to 2k upscaled when the action ramps up is barely visible to most people sitting 6 feet from a TV. It's diminishing returns. And what does 8k bring if you don't have a 200in tv? Can you even see the difference?

Digital cameras went through a similar cycle. Since about 2008, high-end digital cameras have been good enough that the pictures from them still look great when produced by a good photographer. There has been a lot of sensor improvement since then around dynamic range, etc, but it is not super obvious in a sales demo. Digital camera sales have totally fallen off a cliff and now what sells now is software improvements on cell phones that make it easier to take good pictures with no thought, not drastic hardware improvements.

I think that consoles are starting to hit a point where they are powerful enough for the kinds of games that we currently have the resources to build. Making the graphics even "better" requires an enormous development investment that only pays off for the few most popular blockbuster games. It's hard for a console maker to find compelling demonstrations of why they need more power right now.

Like with cameras, miniaturization and new form factors is really interesting. Nintendo is killing it with the Switch despite the dinosaur hardware. It's a lot easier for them to demo improvements for a Switch 2 because the Switch isn't at the point of "good enough" yet for many types of games.

Of course computers will get more powerful and console development isn't done forever or anything like that. But it feels like the hardware is currently a bit ahead of the software maybe for the first time in history which makes the value of a upgrade tenuous for many consumers.

xnx• 2 years ago

The prices and features of the latest Xbox and PS5 are making the Nintendo Switch 2 look like an amazing bargain.

haunter• 2 years ago

800€? That's a Ryzen 7 5800X / i5-13500 + RTX 4060 Ti + 32GB RAM + 1TB SSD build. I'd rather have a PC

bane2• 2 years ago

The differences in strategies between Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are absolutely wild, but I think it also really speaks to their respective DNA as a consumer electronics company, a software company, and a toy company respectively. Superficially they all look like videogame console companies, but they're very different companies that just so happen to use videogames as the means to execute their strategy.

Sony seems to presently be on a path that's somewhat dictated by their traditional console concepts of moving data around as fast as possible given consumer budgets, and using that as an enabler of greater and greater spectacle for consumers by a large and well rounded network of development houses. This has worked really well for them for all generations of their gaming strategy.

Microsoft is focused on developer experience and using that to drive consumer demand, just doing it in games. This has worked pretty well for them in the West, but has failed abysmally in some parts of the world where the relationship between software developer and consumer isn't as strong. They seem to be working overtime trying to confuse consumers, kill viable IP, and get themselves out of the market in the next generation or two.

Nintendo is focused on the best way to create unique experiences of "play" for the consumer where their own IP is the vanguard for the system, and every other company sits in "other play experiences you can also have...if you want". This will work for them on some generations, then completely bomb on others. But it has kept them viable as the smallest of the three companies for decades, and also near the top of the sales list in a few categories most generations. They also have absolutely impeccable Intellectual Property that they have maintained better than Disney, the former gold standard IP protection company.

To bring this point home, for years there was hubub in the industry that Nintendo would bring out some kind of Switch Pro with 4k output and faster guts, rumors swirled around and around until Nintendo finally brought out? The Switch Light. The opposite of that. Nintendo was answering the question "how do we get more people into our world of play?" And a cheaper, less capable, more rugged, system was their answer.

But for Sony, their DNA is "move electronics". So whenever they feel they can, they'll come out with a new revision or update or accessory to hardware they are already pushing. When Sony was pushing new VR headsets, Nintendo put our a toy kit made of cardboard. When Sony was pushing a handheld streaming accessory, Nintendo's system simply undocked. The PS5, which was at the bleeding edge of state of the art consumer electronics is around 4 years old. The Switch is about to be 8 and was basically a cheap tablet with clip on controllers when it was released.

This isn't for the idealized customer the Nintendo is after. This is for people who want the absolute best hooked into their home multimedia system to show it off, which Sony hopes is also a Sony TV, Receiver, Speaker set, and so on.

What Sony may run the risk for is becoming what NEC became. Lots of variations and incremental updates to their system, with different packaging, until they basically just suffocated themselves out of the running -- pursuing a strategy of pushing custom NEC electronics instead of going to where the industry was going. It could happen.

paulmd4• 2 years ago

To bring this point home, for years there was hubub in the industry that Nintendo would bring out some kind of Switch Pro with 4k output and faster guts, rumors swirled around and around until Nintendo finally brought out? The Switch Light.

Switch Lite is not the console people were referring to in that context. And oddly enough, Nintendo themselves have pseudo-confirmed the launch will occur in Q1 next year via various official statements:

https://x.com/NintendoCoLtd/status/1787736518762881197

(and then they later confirmed that they won't discuss it this year... so it's going to be Q1 next year.)

And again, to underline this point: the hardware itself has literally been ready to go since 2022 or before (prominently, there was an enormous amount of stuff in the hacked nvidia data dump and it's all essentially confirmed accurate at this point) and the delay has frankly baffled industry-watchers. It’s not even just Nintendo being nintendo and favoring older cheaper hardware, they seem to have internally had some pullback or change of heart back a year or two ago such that they decided not to release it.

And obviously at some point the hardware will be relatively weaker than the original switch was at its launch, so at this point they may have to update the hardware again.

But yeah switch is a bad example of “see, rumors are sometimes wrong!” when Nintendo literally had a console generation ready to go, as confirmed by multiple sources, and then just inexplicably decided to pull the plug or delay it for 2 years for inscrutable Nintendo reasons. That’s the Nintendo being Nintendo part - and we have their confirmed-in-financials timeline for release now.

johnnyanmac17• 2 years ago

Switch Lite is not the console people were referring to in that context.

I assume GP was talking more in the 2020 era than right now. That era where a "switch pro was rumored", and then they unveiled the Switch Lite.

Then rumors swirled again, and we got the Switch OLED.

by now we know they completely skipped the idea of a mid generation refresh, so current rumors go straight to a new generation.

the hardware itself has literally been ready to go since 2022 or before (prominently, there was an enormous amount of stuff in the hacked nvidia data dump and it's all essentially confirmed accurate at this point) and the delay has frankly baffled industry-watchers

plans change, especially in this economy. It may be baffling to western economists, but the software side of Nintendo also isn't afraid to sit on fully finished games if the timing is off. Advanced Wars remake was delayed a year for bad timing (to put it lightly). Xenoblade was finished for a while, and decided to push its release date up to space it out from Splatoon 3.

They read the winds changing, and realized Switch base was still selling well (and even if it wasn't, Nintendo famously has a decent war chest for tough times). So they just sat. They aren't on the same pulse as Sony/Microsoft, so they aren't pressured by the competition or hardcore consumers to upgrade. Japanese companies have a different attitude towards shareholders, so they aren't afraid to push back if they deem the long term solution is to wait. Nintendo truly goes at its own pace, for better and worse.

But yeah switch is a bad example of “see, rumors are sometimes wrong!”

I think it's the perfect example of "rumors are wrong". Because I'm sure most industry rumors are right... at the time the rumor holder got the info. That info can and often is outdated, simply because situations change so fast in gamedev. So don't take them as gospel.

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