The PS5 Pro disappoints

Yesterday, Sony announced the upcoming PS5 Pro, a powerful improvement on the 4-year old console. Unfortunately, the excessive price and the lack of a disc drive have been a significant disappointment for the main target audience: hardcore PlayStation fans.

PS5 Pro announce, price, and release date

Sony announced the PS5 pro on September 11 2024. Set for a Release of November 7, 2024, the new flagship console will cost $700 (800 EUR in Europe). The PS5 Pro will run the exact same games as the PS5, but at a higher framerate, better resolution, and, depending on the games, better rendering. The PS5 pro will allegedly have less trouble with ray tracing, meaning users might not have to choose between graphics and performance on this new PS5. It will also ship with a 2TB SSD, compared to the 1TB of the current models.

But at $700 with no included disc drive (the Blu-Ray drive can be purchased as an accessory for an additional $80, please see here my opinion on this cursed accessory), critics have started noticing that you can get a very reasonable gaming PC for that kind of price. Something that can be easily upgraded down the line, and that will be playing more games, usually for cheaper too.

As always, Sony probably have a great team working a reasonable price for their devices, but this times it feels they’ve been pushing it just a bit too far, enough for people to start a very relevant comparison to PC gaming. While Nintendo have been differentiating themselves with more exclusives, cheaper hardware, and original form factors and inputs, Sony and Microsoft are getting closer and closer to PC gaming, blurring the lines between their consoles and our good old computers.

With less relevant exclusives, and more push to actually bring those PlayStation exclusives to Steam after a while, it almost feels like Sony are trying to kill PlayStation as a hardware brand, and revamp it as mostly software.

PS Vita 2 Rumors resurface

What a lot of us would like to see of course is a PS Vita 2, but recent rumors regarding such a device appear to be entirely unfounded. Allegedly, Sony would be capitalizing on the success of devices such as the Steam Deck and their very own PlayStation portal, and working with AMD to create a portable GPU more powerful than the PS4. But none of those rumors seem to be backed up by credible sources so far.