By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the PlayStation 5 Pro controversy. Sony’s mid-generation update to its flagship console will come with an outrageous price tag, will be missing basic components, and doesn’t even seem – at first glance, anyway – to offer a significant visual upgrade. With better frame-rates and higher resolutions being basically the only reason to pick up a PS5 Pro for someone who’s already a PlayStation customer… that’s not great.
But I think there’s a lot more to say – and unfortunately, it gets worse! At time of writing, pre-orders for the PlayStation 5 Pro haven’t gone live in the UK, but there’s already a ton of interest in the console, its missing disc drive, and even its ridiculously overpriced stand. The stand is basically just a small ring of metal and plastic, and shouldn’t be worth anywhere close to its purported £25 price tag. But it seems as if eager fans and gamers are queuing around the digital block to pick up the console and its add-ons; pre-orders for the disc drive have sold out in some places in the United States already.
I’ve already criticised Sony here on the website for hiking up the price of the base PlayStation 5 at a time when the corporation is making record profits. To clarify that: Sony has never, in its corporate life, made more money or had a greater profit margin than it has right now – and yet these ridiculous price hikes continue. Microsoft is not immune from this, either – and I’ve been critical of Xbox in recent months too, so please don’t think I’m coming at this issue from a “console war” perspective! If anything, I’m trying to approach this subject from a consumer perspective and a basic fairness perspective. Nintendo… the jury’s out. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the new Nintendo console follows suit and is similarly burdened with a high price tag.
There are two reasons why I find the PlayStation 5 price tag so disturbing, and we’ll look at these issues in turn.
First of all, despite the outrage and dissatisfaction on social media, as mentioned there are plenty of people who seem quite happy to pay the inflated price for the new console – as well as its expensive add-ons. In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked to see the PlayStation 5 Pro become one of this year’s festive bestsellers, with high demand from gamers and parents as Christmas draws nearer. It will almost certainly out-sell anything that Xbox has to offer, and with Nintendo’s new console not due until next year at the earliest, the PS5 Pro could have a fairly open market when it launches this November.
Video games are a consumer marketplace – and that means if there are willing buyers, Sony will be able to get away with selling this underpowered, overpriced, incomplete console to all and sundry. We often hear some variant of the expression “social media is not real life,” and for all of the outrage and criticism that has been thrown at Sony since the PlayStation 5 Pro was announced… that won’t actually matter to the company’s bottom line if people still show up and buy the damn thing en masse. And it seems like that’s exactly what’s gonna happen.
Which leads into my second problem with Sony’s price hike: other companies in the games industry are watching, they’ll see Sony succeed, and they’ll follow suit. Maybe Xbox will release an updated console with a disc drive sold separately. Maybe Nintendo will see Sony’s high price point and bump up the price of its next console by £50 or £100. If Sony’s getting away with it, it will encourage everyone else to do the same thing.
When Sony jacked up the price of the base PlayStation 5 a couple of years ago, Microsoft was quick to jump in and promise that the price of the Xbox Series X would stay the same. And that lasted all of a few months before the price was quietly raised. At the beginning of this generation – less than four years ago – the base price of a standard video game was usually £55 here in the UK – $60 in the United States. 2K Games then announced that their next-gen sports titles would be priced at £65/$70… and what happened next? There was a fuss online… but then those games sold pretty well and every major publisher in the industry followed suit and jacked up the prices of their games, too.
It will happen again with the PlayStation 5 Pro, so I hope you’re prepared to pay £700 or more for a video game console. By the time the next generation of machines are ready in, say, 2028 or 2029… could it be more? Could a PlayStation 6 be £900? Who will be the first to break the £1,000 barrier for new consoles? It now feels like a matter of “when” not “if” that happens.
In the early days, video game consoles actually were pretty expensive. The Atari 2600, one of the earliest home consoles to sell a significant number of units, was priced at $190 in the United States when it launched in 1977 – the equivalent of more than $900 today when accounting for inflation. Its competitors, like the Magnavox Odyssey 2 and Intellivision, were similarly-priced. But the price of consoles came down with the price of home computers in general, and by the time I was buying my first console – a Super Nintendo – in the early 1990s, prices were similar to where they are today when you account for inflation. My SNES was £150 when I bought it (after saving up my pocket money for ages!) which is close to £400 in today’s money.
So for a long time – several generations at least – consoles have been hovering around that price point. There have been some that were cheaper and some that were more expensive, like the Xbox One, but by and large folks have come to expect that home consoles will be affordable. £700 is really pushing the boat out; that’s approaching the kind of money you could spend on a gaming PC. In fact, after a brief Google search I found several gaming PCs at that exact price point!
I’m sick of profiteering and price-gouging by these corporations. The so-called “cost of living crisis” that we’ve been going through for several years now is at the very least being exacerbated by greedy corporations that are trying to use it as an excuse to grab as much money as possible and make as much profit as possible. There have been record-breaking profits announced by everyone from supermarkets and tech companies to oil companies and banks… and it all comes at our expense. That’s the lens through which I view the PlayStation 5 Pro’s exorbitant price tag.
The sad thing is that, in lieu of better options, people will shell out for the PS5 Pro this winter. Folks who don’t have a PlayStation 5 yet may wait to get the refreshed model, and some will undoubtedly be tempted by promises of higher frame-rates and more visually stunning games. Even though the comparison between the base PS5 and the PS5 Pro leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion!
And as I said at the beginning, this feels like an omen of more price rises to come. Nintendo, Microsoft, and other big players in the games industry will be watching the PlayStation 5 Pro. They’ve already taken note of the criticism and backlash it received… but if it still sells like hot-cakes, we can surely expect further price rises when other companies follow suit. It’s disappointing, but honestly not unexpected in this late-stage capitalist marketplace that we all have to wade through.
Sony should be riding high at the moment. The PlayStation 5 has been selling really well, recent console exclusives like Astro Bot and Helldivers II have been well-received, and in spite of Concord proving to be a high-profile flop, the company is raking in money and seems to be at the pinnacle of the games industry right now. The company’s reputation will take a hit from this price hike and the ridiculously expensive add-ons for the PS5 Pro… but as I said a few weeks ago when talking about Concord, I doubt it’ll matter in the long run. Sony probably priced in a certain amount of anger and backlash, and from the company’s point of view it won’t matter as long as players turn up and buy the console; even a begrudging sale is still a sale, at the end of the day.
As we pass the midpoint of this console generation, and with Nintendo preparing its new machine for release, I think the PlayStation 5 Pro and its price tag are just the beginning. A harbinger of things to come.
The PlayStation 5 Pro will be release in the UK on the 7th of November 2024. The PlayStation brand and all related properties discussed above are the copyright of Sony Interactive Entertainment. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 