According to leaked documents, Sony sold 14.3 million units of the PlayStation 4 Pro as of January 2020. So, for every PS4 Pro unit sold, 7 base PlayStation 4 units flew off the store shelves. It’s a respectable number for a then-unexplored mid-generation “refresh.” It also explains why Sony is looking to replicate the PS4 Pro’s success with a PlayStation 5 Pro. But so far, the most recent rumblings aren’t good for the upcoming console.
As per GamesIndustry.biz’s Christopher Dring, he hadn’t met a “single person” at this year’s Game Developers Conference that see the need for a PS5 Pro.
In Dring’s own words, “many feel they’re not really making the most out of the PS5 in the first place.”
To be fair, Dring’s sources has a valid point. There’s a list of reasons why the PS5 Pro shouldn’t happen.
The PS4 Pro was released four years into the PS4’s lifecycle to save it from a growing number of games pushing its performance to its limits. At the same time, 4K resolution was starting to become mainstream. The PS4 Pro was Sony capitalizing on an obvious need. The best part was that it came at an attractive price point, effectively replacing the PS4’s launch price at $399.99. Meanwhile, the base model, which was the PS4 Slim already at the time, dropped to $299 for the 1TB model.
The PS5 Pro has none of those things going for it. The 8K resolution movement has yet to happen. Not to mention, very few PS5 games feel like they’ve explored the extents of its capabilities. More often than not, games launch unoptimized, requiring post-launch patches to improve performance.
The best-performing PS5 games, unsurprisingly, are first-party PlayStation titles such as Horizon Forbidden West and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. The last we heard, there were some complaints about the latter hiding its fast travel feature, which it nearly removed by the way, behind a “hidden loading screen.”
To make matters worse, price cuts for the PS5 are far and few in between, especially for the newly released PS5 Slim model. In fact, Sony Chair Hiroki Totoki went out of his way to confirm that no price cuts for the PS5 are planned despite its sales tracking lower than the initial projections.
Truth be told, it all feels like we’re still waiting for this console generation to kick off, or so to speak.
While there’s an endless pile of reasons why the PS5 Pro makes little sense, especially as developers should only get better at using Unreal Engine 5, which will result in better-looking well-optimized games with smoother performance, there’s only one reason why Sony is pushing through with its plans: it will sell.
The PS5 has a massive lead over its competition, which will only grow as more of Xbox’s games crossover to the PS5.
It’s true the PS5 feels like it’s only two years old at times. It wasn’t until recently that people really had a reason to pick one up because of the global pandemic and the lack of exclusive releases for the flagship console. God of War: Ragnarok was on PlayStation 4 and so was Horizon Forbidden West. Even Gran Turismo 7 is on PlayStation 4. Even though the first two games we mentioned had post-launch expansions exclusive to the PS5, they’re not enough to justify upgrading to a PS5 for most people.
The closest thing we have to a game that justifies making that leap is Baldur’s Gate 3, an award-winning title that has sold more than 15 million copies, and, to some extent, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, a sequel tracking below the first game in sales.
There just aren’t enough PS5 games. As a result, those end up upgrading will just play PS4 games, enjoying them with better graphics and higher resolutions.
But wouldn’t the same logic apply to the PS5 Pro even if it’s only to fewer people? The allure of playing existing and future PS5 games in a shinier and smoother way is hard to ignore for certain people.
The promise of playing today’s games at a fixed 4K resolution and at a stable 60 frames per second, which is currently a pipedream on PS5, will draw in its fair share of players, especially if it can live up to expectations.
Mind you, the PS5 Pro’s rumored hardware isn’t half-bad. It might not be a generational leap (to be fair, those days are long gone), but the PlayStation Spectral Resolution will, in theory, make games prettier with better ray tracing performance and cleaner graphics without the commonly associated frame rate hit.
True, the asking price will be high, but Sony knows that people will pay a premium for a device that lets them have their cake and eat it.
As a bonus, with Grand Theft Auto 6 coming out next year – it’s either late next year if you ask Take-Two Interactive or 2026, as per another report – gamers will be in a mood to splurge for the best way to play Rockstar Games’ upcoming game.
