For most of the history of console gaming--and we're talking decades here--generations of and updates to machines tended to mean something. Each new batch of consoles offered substantial upgrades over those that came before. When companies began releasing updates mid-generation, those updates--from Sony especially--used to mean price cuts.
But during the Xbox One and PS4 years of the past decade, console updates became less and less noteworthy. The leaps in visuals weren't as vast, "old gen" games would stick around for longer than they used to and controller innovation became, Nintendo aside, virtually non-existent. The term we used to use with sincerity for new generations of consoles was "next gen". For the past ten years it's been more like "diminishing returns".
The PS4 and Xbox One offered only marginal improvements over their predecessors, and the PS5 and Xbox Series X have offered even less. Even the last mid-cycle refresh, the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, proved a limited proposition. But the term "diminishing returns" doesn't just suggest we get less and less with each new offering; it suggests that at some point we'll stop getting anything at all.
The PS5 Pro announcement sure feels like we're pretty close to that point. In the middle of an inflationary and cost-of-living crisis, when the proposition of expensive AAA gaming has never looked worse, along comes Sony with a console that is...hundreds of dollars more expensive than the machine currently on sale? And offers so little of value to the vast majority of gamers, their human eyes and regular TV sets?
Like, what is the point here? Surely now, given the market and the climate, would have been the perfect time for a cheaper, more accessible PlayStation. Instead this is a console designed, priced and marketed solely at the kind of person who makes six figures, watches Digital Foundry videos then argues about them on Reddit.
The PS5 Pro reveal comes less than a year after the PS5 Slim's announcement; the word "slim" used to mean a price cut, a practice pioneered by Sony with the PS2, but that particular console was actually...the same price as the old one. Actually, if you went with the discless edition, it was more expensive.
Christopher Dring wrote in GI.biz earlier today that the problem with the PS5 Pro isn't the price itself, and he's right. The problem is the strategy behind it, that this entire console generation hasn't yet got itself up to "full speed", with too many PS4 ports and too many big studios still on the sidelines because it costs so much money and takes so much time to make a PS5 game. Releasing a machine like this, at this time, is a move representative of a company that is caught in the same technical death spiral that led to Spider-Man 2 costing twice as much to make as Spider-Man.
There are barely enough games out there making full use of the existing PS5 as it is. There will be even fewer making full use of the PS5 Pro, so the fact Sony saw this console as a need, committed resources to it and are now releasing it to market is wild. But it's also the only place left for companies like this to go! Hyperinflated GPU prices and the death of disc drives have killed off any chance of a cheaper console--the PS5 getting price hikes instead of cuts is testament to that--so the super-consumers are the only market left for Sony to reach. Or, in this case, reach again.
I don't think there's been a console and price announcement this disastrous since PlayStation's notorious $599 PS3 reveal back in 2006. This is a machine totally at odds with the time of its release, and if the concept of diminishing returns implies that consoles (from Sony and Microsoft at least) are on a trajectory, then we're dangerously close to the flatline. If this is what Sony is offering in 2024 I can only dread what the next actual consoles will look like, and what little they'll offer. Or worse, what they'll be priced at.
