The PS5 Pro Is Stupid

this video was sponsored by ground news more from them in a bit the PS5 Pro is a bad idea it's a bad idea I've seen the polls online I've seen the discourse and it seems like only a small fraction of people are even interested in this thing not because it isn't capable because it isn't powerful because it isn't professional by most metrics it does seem like a meaningful upgrade over the original PS5 but price $700 700 smackaroos yeah this ain't going to end well adjusted for inflation there have been many consoles in the past that have cost more than the modern equivalent of $700 at launch but usually most successful consoles try to stay around the $5 to $600 Mark adjusted for inflation and for good reason 700 bucks it's a lot of money yeah adjusted for inflation the original PS3 did cost more than this at launch especially that $599 model which would have been the equivalent of over 930 bucks today but here's the thing the PS3 was a disaster at launch and also the PS5 Pro doesn't come with the disc drive no that'll cost you an additional $80 and all of this is just pricing for the United States in the UK this all costs sign significantly more adding up to a console that costs over ,000 with a disc drive why does it cost this much you could blame the death of Moore's Law computers in general are getting more expensive maybe Sony just wanted to hike up their share price maybe Sony saw that people were paying a premium for ps5s when scalpers were getting their hands on them and they just wanted to see what they could get away with or maybe it's the fact that there is no longer serious competition in the in the console industry that could be it too like I said initial polls from IGN and social media seem to indicate that a vast majority of people of consumers have no interest in buying this thing $700 is just too much for people to wrap their heads around for a pro console for a midgen refresh for a thing that plays all the same games that the last box can play but slightly better but even with all this backlash for whatever reason analysts are still predicting that this thing will be a success and that seems odd to me so today I want to talk about that I want to talk about why I think the analysts are wrong why I think this is a bad move why this is a bad sign for the future of console gaming and why I always try to stay up to date with what's happening and ground news helps a lot with that ground news allows you to see at a glance the political leaning in factuality of Any Given news source and that's good because a lot of media is pretty biased okay so recently the new iPhone was announced the iPhone 16 in ground news compiled 301 articles about this story forb says Apple's AI iPhone 16 Apple stock slumps during long awaited events since ground news lets me see all these different articles at once I can tell that Forbes is an outlier they're the only ones that seem to be reporting this information and they have mixed factuality and I can quickly see that this was clickbait comparatively CET which has high actuality sticks to the facts my favorite feature of ground news though is the blind spot this shows you stories that one political side or the other just isn't reporting on conveniently and it's fascinating to see how much news just goes unreported so try ground news today and get 40% off the Vantage plan by going to ground. news/ husk link is in the description I'm not inherently against the idea of a midgen refresh of a pro con in fact I think it's a good idea usually you often hear people say you don't play Graphics you play games Graphics don't matter the games matter and yeah that's that's true it does not matter how good a game looks if it is a bad game it is a bad game and people are not going to play it but one aspect of the visuals does matter the frame rate frame rate is the measure of how many frames appear per second on screen how frequently your TV or monitor monor updates the image in motion yes this does provide for smoother motion but the real main reason that people care about frame rates is because a higher frame rate means a faster response time there is less lag between you pressing a button on a controller and the image changing on screen now it's hard to show this off in a video but when you're playing a game you can feel the difference it can actually make stuff more fun by having a better frame rate that that I know it sounds weird but that's true during the PS5 Pro reveal Mark cery said that 75% of users chose a higher frame rate over better visuals when given the choice this is why at the beginning of the generation both console manufacturers were insisting that these new boxes were not just targeting 60 FPS but 120 FPS allowing for some unprecedented response times for game consoles but over the years as gam started looking better got a little bit more demanding developers had to make a choice either Target a high frame rate or push for better visuals now we're at a point where a game like Space Marine 2 is dropping into the mid-30s and 40s in terms of frame rate on PlayStation 5 all the while it varies between 720p and 1080p for its internal resolution yeah that's not quite the 8K 120 FPS like Sony promised so if this is the case if games are getting harder to run if they are running worse on the base Hardware then maybe a pro console makes sense right after all much of the PlayStation 5's reveal focused on effectively doubling the frame rates of Select games getting both better visual Fidelity and effects without compromising that frame rate part of this is achieved through AI upscaling which has been used for a while on PC with stuff like dlss alongside a significant boost to the console's GPU Graphics Processing Unit but here's the thing these are select examples of games that will see huge benefits or maybe not that huge but benefits but a lot of them are games from PlayStation studios in the list of PlayStation 5 Pro enhanced titles it's not very long not every game is going to see huge upgrades on this PlayStation 5 Pro like let's take Space Marine 2 the reason the game probably has such a low frame rate on PS5 probably isn't because of the GPU it's probably the CPU but understand that Sony didn't really focus its efforts on upgrading the PlayStation 5 PR CPU from the original box it focused on the GPU so if this game runs pretty bad because of the PlayStation 5 CPU it's safe to assume it's not going to run significantly better on the PlayStation 5 Pro this was actually the subject of a pretty big controversy a while back when the guys at digital Foundry suggested that if GTA 6 ran at 30 FPS on PlayStation 5 due to a CPU limitation due to a CPU bottleneck then the PlayStation 5 Pro might not be able to run the game at 60fps yes we know that that GPU is beefier it will help in games with unlocked frame rates but that doesn't mean that every game will be taking full advantage of this Hardware to get stuff like super fancy rate tracing developers are going to have to you know make PS5 Pro enhanced versions of their games something they might have no incentive to do if this thing doesn't sell that well which I don't think it will cuz it's $700 $700 for an upgraded experience that still doesn't guarantee 60 FPS for new games for titles that might look slightly better and improvements to raay tracing when much of the industry is moving to software Solutions like unreal engines loomen system as opposed to hardware-based rage racing so like who is this for I am very interested to see whether there is a significant number of people who find this box appealing are there a lot of people out there who are willing to pay this much money for a PS5 Pro especially when there's a very obvious alternative if you care about this stuff if you care about visual Fidelity in performance and frame rates and raid tracing and blah if you have the disposable income to drop $700 on a game console maybe you should start looking into a PC okay so I am a bit biased here while I have a soft spot for consoles I am primarily a PC Gamer and the reason for that is because of stuff like this I like playing games on consoles for the first few years of a new consoles lifespan when the games are running great at these good frame rates and fancy resolutions but at some point during the generation more and more games start running worse and worse and worse look I can play games at 30 FPS I can I can games at 10 FPS it's not the end of the world to me but if I have the option to cut the graphics down to cut down the fancy textures and play at a higher frame rate I'm going to do that I'm going to do that because the game will actually play better and it will feel better and I will have more fun but on consoles if it runs like garbage you're just stuck unless the developers patch the game there's nothing you can do so rather than deal with all this I just decided okay I'll I'll go to the PC and I'm seeing a lot of people who feel the same way so I do have to address uh price if you are going to build a PC that's going to outperform a PS5 in every single game it's going to cost it might it might cost you some money if you want to outperform the PS5 Pro in every single game it's going to cost a lot of money but if you just want to play at a better frame rate might be cheaper than you think I don't know depends depends how much you think it costs like what happens if the PlayStation 6 is $700 are people going to pay that much for it or will they just pay a little bit more and get a PC I mean PCS are really accessible you can play them in your living room plug in a PlayStation controller hook it up to your TV through HDMI use Steam Big Picture Mode I'm not trying to turn this into a a PC better than console thing I'm just saying people are going to start thinking about all of these different factors when considering whether a PS5 Pro is worth the money because yeah while a PC might cost more upfront when you start to factor in stuff like PlayStation's Market on games through the PSN store the fact that you have to pay to play games online and you consider that a new game console is probably going to drop in a few years well hey a $1,500 $2,000 build doesn't look that unreasonable as for everybody else for 90% of the console audience this whole thing will just be dismissed as a $700 luxury one of the biggest selling points of a game console is price game consoles are successful extreme ly successful because they have such a low barrier of Entry 300 400 bucks for a computer of this level of power is it's it's good that's that's a good price honestly but when you start increasing that barrier of Entry when you start increasing that price substantially people are not going to buy the new boxes look even four years into the PlayStation 5 and Xbox series X's life cycle there are still Millions upon millions of users who have not upgraded to the new box because they haven't had a reason so many games still work on the original Xbox One and PS4 this audience does not care about frame rate or resolution or Graphics all they care about is the game honestly it was stuff like the new college football game that ended up pushing a lot of these users over to the new generation boxes and I'm sure that in part this is why the PS5 Pro exists look GTA 6 is going to be a it's it's going to be a big deal when you look at the sheer number of copies sold for GTA 5 you can tell this is going to be it's it's big you know and I think Sony is kind of relying on people to walk into a store want to buy a new console to play the new GTA 6 they'll see the PS5 they'll see the PS5 Pro next to it and they'll buy the pro simply because it's the better experience the game's not releasing on PC on day one so Sony can say that the game plays best and looks best on the PS5 Pro and you're going to get a lot of people that buy the pro even if they don't fully understand what the thing does or what its limitations are maybe this is why Sony feels like they can charge this much or maybe it's something a little bit more malicious I'm genuinely scared about what the Next Generation consoles might be uh what if the PlayStation 6 is $700 I'm scared that people are just going to put up with it deal with it because they have to because Sony will have no competition I mean look the reason the PS5 Pro probably costs so much is because there is no Xbox series X pro there is no midgen refresh for that box no alternative by the competition the Nintendo switch it's a different market and looking forward if XBox goes down if XBox collapses if the Next Generation box does not sell well Sony's not going to have any real competition at all we're getting into Uncharted Territory here but I think what we're seeing is our first look at a PlayStation brand that just doesn't have to worry about competition anymore we're getting $700 price tags no disc drives the increased price of controllers and Hardware Sony won the console war and now we lose look I hope I'm wrong I hope that Sony is maybe just trying to appeal to a small Niche within their Community but I can't shake this feeling that they're testing the waters for something else trying to see what price point is acceptable for a new game console to try and see what they can get get away with and that would just be that's concerning they should have just made a PS Vita 2 instead people would have actually liked that again huge thanks to ground news for sponsoring this video they're doing great work over there and right now you can get 40% off the Vantage plan by going to ground. news/ husk link is in the description go check him out [Music]