PS5 Pro Controversy Has a SAD Reality To It

the announcement of the PlayStation 5 pro has so far been controversial its $700 price point lack of dish drive and lack of vertical stand has all been at the root of this discourse and while detractors are saying that it's not worth the $700 price point many fans are countering by saying it's still one of the cheapest places to do 4K gaming both of these are valid points in their own way and to be clear here I do enjoy Sony games and the PlayStation brand yet at the same time I also think that it's no secret why this landed the way that it did for starters the presentation itself it was a short 99-minute technical presentation the presentation also used a game built for the PS4 The Last of Us two to demo the PS5 Pro though they did end up using a lot of PS5 games as well I believe the lack of a brand new enticing title with visuals that would have really blew people away is honestly one of the biggest mistakes here though yes playing these older games at higher resolutions and frame rates is enticing on its own for $700 and no disc drive it is really hard to sell me on games that I already own being played a little bit better as such that's the way the value proposition presented itself things that you've already played in the past 4 years being experienced a little bit better this picture became more clear for me when I pulled my YouTube Community I asked them are you satisfied with the resolution frame rate and overall visual Fidelity of your Bas PS5 41% said yes 37% said most of the time so that is 78% of people feeling that their PS5 base does just fine 133% saying that they don't even own a PS5 with only 8% total expressing outright dissatisfaction with it and it's only a heart no from 3% of that eight that being said of course there is a counterargument that this is a luxury item and of course not everyone can afford a PS5 Pro and also not everyone can appreciate a PS5 Pro but it is an option for those that can despite this there are still many people who make great points about the price as I mentioned in a previous video I'm personally a guy who owns most of his games digital that being said I believe the vast majority of PS5 owners own at least one physical game meaning that if your library is comprised of physical games you have no choice but to spend money on the $80 dish drive this dis drive is not included on the unit and is sold separately and as a result the PS5 disc drive is already selling out online as a result some people who buy a PS5 Pro may not even have access to a dish drive on day one and may not be able to play most if not all of their favorite games so the Practical price of PS5 Pro for most people is bare minimum going to be $780 though let's also be fair many people will be trading in their ps5s in order to buy PS5 Pro making the price significantly cheaper but that being said there is still a dilemma here let's suppose you have a PS5 slim and you want to save the dis drive for the PS5 Pro yes you can detach it and put it on your pro although if you want to sell or trade in that PS5 slim for a pro by removing the disc drive you're getting less money for the unit but I suppose that evens out by you not having to buy the dis drive though if you have a standard launch PS5 as most people currently do you're just completely out of luck and there is no choice but to spend the money I've been talking in dollars and being very United States Centric here but in Europe will cost €800 which is800 $80 in Japan it cost almost 120,000 Yen or around 844 us both of these are without a dish drive and once you add all this together you'll be paying close to ,000 United States dollar for the PS5 Pro now again you can argue that this is an optional high-end device purely for the Enthusiast and not meant for the everyday consumer I completely agree as the poll that I showed earlier showed shows that most people are already satisfied and given how many people you'll also see anecdotally saying they can't even tell the difference between 30 FPS and 60 or 1080p and 4K clearly they are not the target audience for this but let's wind the clock back for a second when the base PS4 launched it was $400 eventually this would be cut to $300 when the PS4 Pro launched this new Pro unit would take the base unit's launch price of $400 meaning that the base PS4 became cheaper and more accessible for people to buy and for anyone craving a better experience it was a very easy very seamless upgrade to PS4 Pro and you didn't have to buy a disc drive in order to do it that is to say consoles don't get price Cuts anymore the switch is still $300 after over 7 years and the standard PS5 is still 500 after 4 and in some regions the PS5 has actually gone up in price with Sony saying that this is due to high inflation rates it's also been said that the PS5 Pro is not necessarily guaranteed to run every game at 60 frames per second going forward with the experts over at digital Foundry saying that they don't expect PS5 Pro to be able to run Grand Theft Auto 6 at 4K 60 highlighting that while the GPU increase is nice this is still running on the same CPU and that ultimately this isn't a GPU problem it's a CPU one this again again is a pretty similar situation to PS4 Pro where all the first party games ran pretty well on it but there were still third party games like Final Fantasy 15 that would run at about 45ish frames per second on its performance mode never quite reaching the full 60 while some games did support some decent 4K upscaling most games did not offer native 4K but PS4 Pro had one difference though that still made it worth it price point was incredibly fair and though you could argue that the PS4 Pros upgrade was marginal so was the price increase that being said I think the PS5 Pro may offer more consistent results than the PS4 Pro did Jeff key also shared a list of inflation adjusted prices for Mainline PlayStation consoles since launch I like Jeff but he got a lot of crap for this one the issue that the community note points out is that PS5 Pro is comparable to the PS5 digital Edition which is not included in this list didn't have the dis Drive the PS5 Pro dish Drive is $80 so it'll be a total of $ 77899 for it to be one to one with the rest of the PlayStation versions in this list the other issue is one that I've also pointed out on Twitter but it's the fact that wages have not really adjusted for this inflation to demonstrate this here's a list of how long you'd have to wait using the federal minimum wage of the United States in order to afford these consoles you see you'd only have to work 70 hours for a PS1 and 58 hours for a PS2 116 hours for the Playstation 3 they were really serious when they said they wanted you to get two jobs for that one 55 hours for both the PS4 and PS4 Pro which is really good the most optimal on this list and a huge reason that the PS4 sold so well PS5 base comes in at 68 hours but you'd have to work 96 hours for a PS5 Pro and 107 hours if you also wanted the dis drive now I know most of you especially gamers are probably making more than the federal minimum wage however across the board wages really haven't increased all that much not compared to the inflation that has continued to happen as a result even though PS5 Pro may be adjusted to inflation at an appropriate price people aren't making more in fact they're technically making less however I don't think this is purely about the price I think people will actually pay whatever if they feel the value proposition is there as we reflected on the pul from earlier it really is only a few nerds that really care about higher frame rates and resolutions that much on a console for me this is easily solved by running these games on PC where I actually can guarantee the frame rates and resolutions one thing I think would have really gener erated excitement would be backwards compatibility with PlayStation 1 through 3 that's something that would actually make PS5 Pro the ultimate PlayStation being able to run those games natively I think if you did that and you included a dis drive people would have been incredibly excited for it a lot more so than background images or sharper resolution textures because the truth is we've reached a point with Graphics where we're just getting diminishing returns you're paying a lot more but you're not getting tremendously more and practically speaking I think most people find the base PS5 to be enough all of this being said there is also one other issue that a lot of people aren't thinking about and that is that the bit rate on YouTube is not great what does that have to do with anything well let's start with this whenever you go and look at these comparisons they really are not going to stand out to you unless you are looking at them directly on a screen and mind you that YouTube is one of the higher quality places to look at videos online if you compare that to Twitter or God forbid Facebook as a result most people can't even directly see the differences between these two now I'm sure they're really apparent when you're looking at them directly on screen but part of marketing the differences here is being able to see the fluidity being able to see the quality of the rate tracing in the image upgrade which the bit rate is going to Destro destroy so even the increased value proposition that you are getting from upgrading to the PS5 Pro is going to be very difficult for them to communicate in terms of marketing for example the PS5 Pro enhanced Final Fantasy 7 rebirth got some screenshots that were shared and as someone who spent quite a bit of time looking at this game these are very much enhanced from The Game's performance mode and though I can tell a difference between these two from these screenshots you may not notice a difference at all for starters I looked at these screenshots on a computer screen but if you're looking at them on a phone well you probably aren't going to really notice a difference in image sharpness on a screen that's small things like this are difficult to overcome given the PS5 Pros price and that to many people this is a marginal amount of increased value but with all that being said I am sure that the PS5 Pro is still going to sell out because there are always enough people who care about this sort of thing in order to buy it it's a very typical very ironic pattern but I do wonder how this will do when compared to the PS4 Pro but with that being said be sure to check out my latest essay on Final Fantasy 10 it covers the legacy of one of the greatest games of all time and why contemporary FF games simply can't match up to it and I will see you all in the next video later guys