$700, and the side by sides look barely different, from my perspective. The chat seemed to have the same opinion.
If consoles want to remain relevant in the age of the gaming PC, they have to try harder than being locked-down gaming PCs.
Free and simple multiplayer, subsidised hardware, and physical game ownership were staples of most consoles for years but now the urge to turn every device into an “everything machine” has kneecapped the very purpose of these devices.
At best, these are slightly less hassle and slightly more social than a gaming PC. At worst, they’re as anti-social and user-hostile without the cost benefit that once made them genuinely preferable.
Sony will try to drag this thing out at least one more generation. If that goes like this one–and it has room to actually go worse–then Sony will have to make some hard decisions.
Sony’s problems are twofold:
- They are charging an absurd amount of money for a game console
- They are selling a game console that has practically no first party games for it.
If they had plenty of the latter, they could weather this. But there are still games releasing for the PS4, and they have had 1, maybe 2 PS5 releases that would qualify as first party this year (that don’t bubble down to PC).
I love the price. At $700 it’s just what I needed to convince my friend who was holding out for the pro to move on to PC. $700 buys a pretty decent AMD card nowadays. Shit for $800 we’re talking decent refurbished gaming PCs.
The side-by-sides are definitely diminished returns compared to earlier gens where hardware bumps had very noticeable gains.
I am sure the performance is measurably better than the base PS5, but I don’t think it’s $200-plus-separate-disc-drive better.
I also found the game choices they used for some of these comparisons to be odd picks. Sure you have “Made for PS5” exclusives like the new Ratchet and Clank, Returnal, and Spider-Man 2, but they also heavily showcased:
-
The Last of Us Part 2
-
God of War: Ragnarok
-
Ghost of Tsushima
-
Horizon: Forbidden West
-
Control
All of those are last-gen games that received PS5 enhancements. Being on a base PS5, I already feel like I am getting the “better” experience compared to the default for those games, so why upgrade?
Well, as a PC gamer, there’s a bunch of settings you can turn on from “last Gen” games to make them look better. Just because they ran on those machines doesn’t mean you were getting the best version. If you’re playing on console you’re never getting the best version. This newer one can just turn on more settings and a higher resolution and framerate than the previous ones. I wish they’d let players decide what settings they want themselves, but sadly that’s not happening on console anytime soon I don’t think.
Chasing the “best version” is a fool’s errand, though. Unless you’re buying top-of-the-line hardware every cycle, you’ll never have the best. And even then, there are games that seem to target future hardware by having settings so high not even top-end PCs can max them out comfortably, and other games that are just so badly optimized they’ll randomly decide they hate some feature of your setup and tank the performance, too.
Everyone has their threshold for what looks good enough, and they upgrade when they reach that point. I used my last PC for 10 years before finally upgrading to a newer build, and I’m hoping to use my current one as long as well.
But just based on the displayed difference in performance between the base PS5 and the PS5 Pro, it doesn’t seem like a good investment for what benefits you get. It’s like paying Apple prices for marginally better hardware, and with overpriced
wheelsdisc drive sold separately.For sure, trying to max out everything is a bad idea. You can always have from FPS and higher resolution, for example. My point is just that “last Gen” doesn’t mean anything. The previous console versions couldn’t max the games out if they had graphics options. The game being older doesn’t mean it doesn’t take advantage of more advanced setting with better hardware.
I think chasing high graphics settings in general is a dumb idea. My favorite games are low fidelity indie games that do interesting things (right now Ostranauts, but also Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, and so many others). The games that max out my hardware are generally worse games. If you’re selling your game based on graphics then you aren’t selling it based on gameplay. I know console players generally seem to care about “realistic” graphics more, but it’s a fool’s errand.
Man, this is true now, but this conversation makes me very nostalgic for the good old days of the 1080Ti, where PC games were absolutely a “max out and forget” affair.
Sure, that was because monitors were capped out at 1080p60, by and large. These days people are trying to run 20 year old games at 500fps or whatever. But man, the lack of having to think about it was bliss.
-
I already feel like a chump for getting the PS5. There’s hardly any games for it. Hell, there are some games I can’t play on it. I can’t imagine what’s changed so drastically in the last couple years to even be worth an upgrade.
What can’t you play?
Some of the transfered PS3 games (Katamari was one I remember). The Tomb Raider Puzzle game glitches (doesn’t on the PS4), and it seems any game that uses an app (tried to play a trivia game with the family and it didn’t work until we went to the PS4).
Not anything life or death, big named stuff works fine, but it’s just annoying to have to go back to the PS4 to have things play right.
Why not go PC at this point. Modern consoles are locked pre-built PCs and paying $700 for a locked system is crazy.
Because of the hope that at some point someone smart will discover an exploit that will allow everyone to install their own homebrew and possibly a completely different OS which will result in a good spec PC with powerful GPU for extremely cheap.
I just remembered china was selling PCs with the PS5 hardware I think ltt(fuck them but irrelevant) did a video on it long ago and I think if you were just to dump the bios from that to a normal PS5 idk what the difference would be
Awesome, I can pay $700 to play Bloodborne in 30 fps
No no they’re going to make Bloodbore 30th anniversary re-release PS5 Pro Exclusive with 45 fps
I’m still waiting for a reason to get a PS5 at all, everything I’ve been interested still got released on PS4 too - except for one single game.
I really don’t care for better specs anymore, I probably couldn’t even tell PS4 and PS5 games apart without a side-by-side comparison. Not to mention, to see a difference at all I’d need a new TV on top of the console. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
One major improvement with the PS5 is the instant loading times. I don’t think this thing will be any faster in that regard but it’s a major improvement over the PS4. The other improvement over my original PS4 is that it doesn’t sound like a jet engine after 20 minutes of running.
Ray tracing is cool but what console games are even using it at this point? It’s like them advertising “8K capable” as if anyone gives a shit about that during a time that 4k is just barely becoming the standard for most.
Consider opening up that PS4 and cleaning out any dust. It doesn’t fix the noise completely, but it can make a big difference.
You can do an SSD upgrade to reduce load times.
Consoles are a dying breed, especially Xbox and Playstation. Almost every exclusive ends up on PC anyway now, even then I personally don’t think there’s any game worth spending this much on hardware to play. There’s literally no point in buying an Xbox or Playstation unless you really really don’t want to bother with a PC setup.
I bet the market will end up as just PC and mobile. I mean the PC market share has already overtaken consoles.
Yeah nah
We will see when Playstation 6 releases, its unlikely to sell as much as PS5 did, let alone PS4. Microsoft already realised the decline and are jumping into games as a service for the Xbox brand, ideally they would want you to just stream their games, as shitty as that is. With Xbox gone, there’s no competition and with Sony being Sony, they are going to abuse that to squeeze any extra money they can from people still willing.
PC became a lot more affordable and accessible in the last decade and it doesn’t lock you into a closed ecosystem, you can upgrade when you want, you don’t have to pay subscriptions to play online games.
Kids are more exposed to PC gaming than ever before, with all the popular ‘content creators’ primarily playing on PC, so they are naturally swayed to it more than consoles.
I hear so many stories of people switching to PC, friends asking me for advice for what to buy for themselves or their children.
Circana’s May 2024 U.S. video game market highlights, the analytics company reported that video game hardware spending is down 40% compared to 2023. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have all shown “double-digit percentage declines,” with the Nintendo Switch seeing the “most significant drop.”
The writing is on the wall, it would take a big change to swing back the other way. There’s a reason they are dying for GTA 6 to release.
Most of the replies about ps5 pro is complaining about the price. Your point is, PC is somehow a better choice while the video card alone cost this much or more.
So no, I don’t think consoles will disappear, more likely streaming will improve to the point of being a real alternative and that will take over the people buying consoles. In fact it could be an alternative to PC as well, for non-competitive gaming.
The sales decline is because console companies don’t provide good enough reason to upgrade, and the market is saturated, not because people moving to Pc. Here I am rocking my xbox one pro still with no desire to upgrade.
That’s just not true. You can make an entire PC for the price of the PS5 Pro. You can get a GPU that is a bit more powerful than a PS5 Pro GPU for ~$300. People normally spend more on PCs though because of the longevity it provides and you can use it for a lot more than just games. Just looking at Steam data, there’s a yearly increase of MAUs (their concurrent count just peaked 3 days ago at 37.6M) where Playstation has plateaued.
Time will tell, but I think consoles will fade away, either through lack of appeal or turning into stream boxes as you say. Thanks for the conversation!
To top it off, what matters at the end of the day js this - people generally don’t care about graphics anymore!
Even if you end up with graphics that are worse than a console, you still have:
- an option to upgrade later
- options to configure graphics (generally games actually optimize themselves pretty well nowadays)
- an open platform to do things the way you want
PS5 Pro makes absolutely no sense to me.
If a PC GPU is only slightly better than a console counterpart, typically its games will run slightly worse - since it loses the benefit of devs spending time optimizing for that profile.
You can adjust settings on PC, so you can trade off some useless post processing and other settings to push the frame rates way higher than console games, which are generally 60fps (or 120fps in some cases, if you run “performance mode”).
At the beginning of this generation, I planned to buy a used PS5 when the Pro version was coming. I did not know that the PS5 would have almost no games for me (especially because they released the big ones for me on PC), the base PS5 would cost even more, and most people will not upgrade to the Pro because of its absurd pricing (note because it’s not worth it, but because the market for it is likely very niche).
I guess I will just skip Sony’s platform for this generation.
I don’t see the point in this. I’m already planning to get a PC (and a Radeon 7900 XTX will always outperform a PS5), so it’s just more money for no benefit.
It’s a pity SONY didn’t have any games to announce alongside the new console. There is nothing or there I feel like I need more power to play, and I already completed games they demoed, sometimes years ago.
Absolutely agree with this statement. They seem to have no pipeline for keeping up with this console lifecycle.
As the owner of a Series X and PS5, they’re just streaming boxes that I occasionally use to play stuff that won’t run under Proton.
SEVEN HUNDRED US DOLLARS!
Sony costumers need to remind them of the PS3.
IT’S RIDGE RACER! RIIIDGE RACER! Remember that one?
I hope that series comes back someday.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MApTG1wapJA&si=6CIbRLjbfUwV29IT
Great video showing the difference of the two
I do feel for Sony’s PR teams. Trying to explain the concept of visual improvements in 4K over Youtube’s increasingly vaseline-smeared compression is an impossible task.
What do I do with my PS5 discs if I buy the Pro one day? Are they just unusable? Will I be able to get a digital copy for free since I already paid them for the disc they stopped supporting?
It seems like there’s no sane migration path from PS5 with disc drive to the PS5 Pro.
There’s an external drive accessory you can buy from them for about $80.
I personally find it pretty horrendously insulting they put out a “Pro” console that can’t play the fucking game discs unless you pay them for an additional accessory.
Not a console gamer, but I’m sure they looked at the statistics and saw most players don’t buy a physical disk anyway. Why make the machine more expensive for an accessory that probably isn’t being used. On my computer I haven’t had a physical disk drive in probably 15y and haven’t ever thought that I needed one.
Well, sure, but that’s also because on PC I can choose to buy DRM-free games and have guaranteed backwards compatibility for the foreseeable future. Plus it’s not a closed system based on a console that launched with a drive. People (me included) already own PS5 discs, not from a previous generation, but from this one. It’s bad enough that I need to keep my PS3 around to play PS3 games, it’d be absurd to not be able to play PS5 games I already own because the thing is physically unable to ingest them out of the box.
So yeah, for people in that position the Pro is a hundred bucks more expensive than it says on the sticker, which is already a ridiculously high number.
Oh, ok then. Guess who didn’t read the article. :-)
I don’t know if It turns out that I was stupid for not buying the original PS5 or holding out for a Pro one even from back then.
I was looking forward to this a lot because I could get the better version from day 1 and have a lot of games to play from taking and borrowing my brother’s disc games.
I guess I’ll get the XBSX for GTA VI when it comes.
Not like holding out matters now, they just raised the price in Japan for the 3rd time, second wind said the controller got 5 dollars more expensive, you can only save with used nowadays.
