Mark Cerny’s nine minute reveal of the expected incremental update to the PS5, the PS5 Pro, was chock full of side by side comparisons, discussions of player behavior, and one really hefty price tag. A drive-less SKU of the PS5 Pro will run you $700 when it drops in November. That’s $250 higher than the base model of the PS5 you can buy right now. For my old eyeballs, those side-by-side comparisons didn’t inspire a lot of confidence that this tiny jump is worth the price.
It’s worth mentioning that for around $730, you can go to your local Walmart and pick up a PS5 and a Nintendo Switch OLED. I’m also back where I was a week ago with Concord, asking myself who exactly is the customer for this? If the answer is “rich people who don’t care as long as they have the new thing,” are there enough of them out there to actually jump at this?
If PlayStation is squishing the gap between Performance and Fidelity modes, then I’d expect the visual result of that to be much more dramatic than what we saw. If a regular-ass gamer — i.e. someone who isn’t spending all day looking at a timeline full of video game culture war bullshit — gets to Target and is staring down a $450 model and a $700 model, is the “Pro” branding enough to prevent that gamer to do the ten minutes of research to find the difference is not worth the price jump? I’m not sure!
If Mom or Dad are doing the shopping in November for the Holidays, are they really not going to ask a few questions about a price gap in which you can fit an entire other console? Maybe not! I don’t know! But it seems like a big bet.
I keep bringing up the Switch because I think today’s reveal opened the curtains fully on Nintendo’s unflappable determination to make things fundamentally simple and joyful for the average gamer. “Release a year’s worth of solid to excellent first party games on a console people really love” is such a simple mission but no one else in the space seems to want to chase it.
Phil Spencer certainly talks like this, but Microsoft chases so many different opportunities they’ve failed the first party games part of this mantra. I sometimes imagine a world where they simply made the Series S and focused all of their internal energy on providing a year’s worth of solid to excellent first party games and I weep. For Sony, they think throwing money at a problem is a cure-all, so it’s pigeonholed them into thinking that only the hundred million dollar blockbusters are worth the work.
Nintendo, for all of their very real and sometimes horrifying faults, seems completely unconcerned with any other path. When the Switch 2 is finally announced, I expect consistency and quality. No rugs to pull out, no catches, no sticker shock.
I know it doesn’t quite work like this, but Sony’s loud bad bets on games now seem to be the consumer’s problem to correct by buying an overpriced, super ugly, incremental improvement of a console. We are in a true console plateau, where the returns are diminishing while the stakes seem to be getting higher for the people actually doing the work.
Sony didn’t even put their current Game of the Year candidate in the sizzle trailer.
