The PS5 Pro Can’t Solve Sony’s Real Problem

okay Sony wants you to spend $700 on a new console so obviously the internet is not happy this is basically just a massive case of sticker shock of a product not making sense and all of that in a world where everything seems to cost more and frankly people have lost quite a lot of trust in Sony now their ask is simple but here's the crazy thing their ask actually came with an admission an admission that honestly validates something that I've been thinking and pushing for years here it is 75% of players use performance mod mode on the PS5 75% and again that is with most games defaulting you to Quality mode or at least like giving you the option on boot usually with the selector defaulting to Quality and I think this is a really big ignition it means that 60fps matters not just a bunch of people in the internet saying ah 60fps is best it's the patrici choice don't be wooed by pixels no this is consumers setting things on their console and that means whenever Starfield or AOW basically say no we want to do 30fps on launch especially in a single player game well we can basically say hey guys there's a reason why over in the PS5 we actually have public data as to what people choose and its frame rate and the funny thing is this is PlayStation almost saying that a large segment of Their audience I don't want to say disagrees with their marketing but basically so much of their marketing has been about quality Ray tracing look at the SP Spider-Man with his Ray traced reflection on the puddle and window they do all of that what to Consumers choose to turn that off and to have frames and that actually does get relevant to Sony's pitch their pitch is that if you have a PS5 you probably use performance mode they know you use performance mode so they're trying to say you can have the performance of performance mode and the quality of quality mode at the same time and that's basically what the new console is going to do going through specs are simple there's a B for your GPU with 67% more compute units and 28% faster memory they say that brings a 45% performance uplift though in so many cases with a quality mode the thing that'll actually matter is not the overall performance but what the bottleneck is and so often that bottleneck and you know if you've accidentally turned it on in a game you play it's Ray tracing on that you've got double to Triple the rate tracing performance of the PS5 and they've got pssr which is basically just machine learning based upscaling some custom stuff that they've done with AMD which to be honest I would imagine would be quite good based on the quality of their upscaling stuff in the past the thing we actually care about though is the games so 8 and half th000 PS4 games will get a frame rate or stability boost and some will get better image quality and the same basically will go for PS5 games that's really good but it could be a goddamn nightmare especially as PC Gamers were're used to the idea of more horsepower just equals more frames that's obviously not the case here so as an example if you went and bought say the Spyro remaster you'll be disappointed to know that that's a 30fps lock so because of that I'm pretty glad they're implementing A PS5 Pro enhanced sticker let's let's hope it actually gets used and Communications are good let's blast through the rest of the specs though it's got the same dimensions pretty much as the PS5 but an absolute Game Changer three strips yeah three so if you see someone with three strips in their PlayStation you know they're they're a serious gamer anyway Wi-Fi 7 compatibility with all PS5 accessories but not covers no disc drive but a 2 tbyte SSD Astros playroom and duel sense and all of that for $699 £699 which is quite painful or £ 799 which will absolutely suck in some count specifically but right what if you want to put put it vertically well the vertical stand will cost you 30 bucks what if you want to play games that come in a disc which is probably loads of your games well that's going to cost you another 80 bucks and that means the complete feature set is $89 and like yeah you could totally skimp in a disc drive but if you do you're locked into buying digital games only and that means you lose out in the retailer like you know price discounts and stuff so you'll end up paying way more money than the cost of the disc drive in the long run and that's basically it which means uh yeah this one's went down about as well as you would think the easiest place to go is Jeff Key's poll so it had 66% of its 86k voters say that this in fact was D tier very much unlike the ship posting though the ship posting has been top tier with this one and no wonder this is objectively expensive even in the US market and Sony's take on global exchange rates is um is interesting I can't say I'm a fan now the Fidelity increase will be noticeable like in real life in a 4K TV do you know where it won't be noticeable on a YouTube stream which is where they show this off and this is the exact same thing that happened with the PS4 Pro years back you Tred to pixel peep but uh basically it's pointless because of encoding and also doesn't help that the rest of the markets where it is I mean this is two-thirds of a reasonable gaming PC when you're spending this amount of money I think people are willing to say you know what maybe I skimp a little bit in the graphics card but I just get myself a PC that I can have for a decade that I can upgrade and can actually go the distance also it's more than an OLED deck it's more than a raw Ally so if you've got a PS4 I mean you could just spend less money to get a different experience and surely different experience is what counts not just uh the same experience that's the kicker for me I get 60fps on performance mode on games right now I lose some visuals but that's basically fine I'm playing this on a television from a distance it's not like I'm on my PC where like yeah I can't straight up pixel Peep and see the detail differences yet that's their cell something that I won't always notice and basically don't care about now the 9-minute trailer they did was fronted by the longtime Tech wizard Mark cery and he's awesome he has shipped amazing products people like him people respect him and it focuses on how good the PS5 is but it says Hey imagine playing The Last of Us Part Two PS5 Edition with quality and performance at the same time let's not mention how people have already played that game twice once in the PS4 and again in the PS5 honestly not a great sales pitch fellas and there's the release timing November 7th that does kind of make sense but is there game support for that that's really going to show off like the power of this console and I say that cuz the only aaa's after that point are Assassin's Creed shadows and Marvel Rivals there's no big first party title from Sony that basically says hey this is what a PS5 Pro can do this is going to blow your mind they don't have that unless they do some sort of Shadow drop right there's nothing that pushes the limits here there's nothing that gives you a new reason because if you're a Sony fan you already have a PS5 you've already played those first party games and you've probably played them at 60 FPS are you really going to play them again be excited to buy a new console to play them again at the same frame rate with uh a few more shinies and that raises the question who the hell is this thing for well to talk about who this is for we should probably mention the guy who's actually had hands on and car L the only person is CET Scott Stein here's the deal he says that about 40 to 50 games will have an upgrade patch on launch and these will Target 4K 60 volumetric lighting and new modes for 120 FPS that could be interesting and 8K yes 8K utterly useless that's it though and basically he said that uh when you actually just talk about the specs talk about the features he thinks it's going to be a really tough sell though he does say that it's going to demo pretty well in person which I'd say say is not dissimilar to the PS4 Pro it was a funny little thing it accounted for 133% of PS4 sales and 15% of Revenue but here's the deal unlike the bass PS4 the bass PS5 can hit 60 FPS in most games so I don't know like to me it's hard to logically justify you could get a PS4 Pro and it would be basically still be giving you like 30 FPS but it would often be like well way higher resolution way better visuals and uh just more stable but what we learned from the PS5 is that people care about playability more that's the bar that's actually been raised and this is a new product that's not raising that bar and so that means figuring out what their plan is is even weirder here's another part and this matters a lot the bass PS5 is not getting any cheaper back in the day like they would absolutely like Bargain Bin slash the prices of consoles to pieces and the whole reason was economies of scale right like gpus were just getting made and made and made and made there was the Fab space yada y y That's actually not happened this time though one of Sony's Executives said that much earlier this year basically that the unit economics on making a PS5 are too damn tight and that means they cannot increase the size of their install base Faster by just cutting their prices because I suppose they don't want to just start burning revenue and that pairs with something that's godamn brutal 50% of the player base is on PS4 and to me that's a shocker I cannot imagine playing in a PS4 because I mean come on 30 FPS bad experience but still that is the case now if the 50% who are on PS4s have somehow not been convinced by the PS5 Itself by the games that are only in the PS5 by the performance or by the quality then will the pro do the same thing I would say probably not yes some people will cave they'll Leap Frog this will finally be the time to upgrade but that couldn't be their only target market and so if they're basically realizing that right now they're doing this whole big premium play they think that's been working for them and seemingly PS4 people are not moving over what can they do well they need to appeal to the super fans right the people who actually bought a PS5 upgrade copy of The Last of Us Part Two you see these days there's three letters that really matter and those are ASP average sale price because why buy an iPhone 16 when you can buy an iPhone 16 Pro Max and I bring that up for good reason so often you see Tech influencers basically say these new features are great whatever but honestly buy the pro from last year or just buy the bass 16 you don't need those new features and yet it's the pros that out sell and so there's a trend in consumer electronics that the top end is just getting higher and more and more people are climbing up the price ladder and that's why their whole pitch was basically PS5 is awesome you can have the best graphics ever or you can have amazing frame rates but now you can have both and so I think they've got two safe bet audiences but even with that there's a high chance they could struggle the problem with their 75% choose performance pitch is that 75% choose performance they're already willing to say actually I'd rather do performance I don't care about the quality as much and the key sell about this machine is quality it is saying you don't have to make the compromise but that assumes it's a paintful compromise I do not think it is and I think that's why people are basically mocking the entire thing the thing that's being sold to them is not something they really care about so if not them what about new audiences Sony have even said before that with the PS4 Pro they had loads of new custom customers but today is not then console sales are already slowing right the growth is slowing how many really how many untapped customers are there out there I don't think as many as they think and that means we're left with two camps leap Froggers who are moving away from the PS4 to the PS5 and would rather just buy the thing that feels the most future proofed and then the super fans will lap up anything unless it's Concord and that's the problem the basics don't resonate and it plays straight into the existing frustration that Sony basically say we're the premium Kings and it feels like they take their position for granted that being said a word of caution maybe there are things they know that we don't sometime it only takes one game to make a massive shift in your hardware sales as an example the cheapest way to get EA Sports college football was an Xbox series s and when that game came out and did absolutely amazing in sales Series S spiked are you thinking what I'm thinking then Grand Theft Auto 6 GTA 6 is potentially the largest entertainment release ever it's one of those games that will sell 50 million copies that seems like a completely insane thing to say but no it's GTA it could sell 50 million copies and GTA 6 is a game that will launch unlike GTA 5 whenever GTA 5 came out it was running on an Xbox 360 they had to do Wizardry with the hard drive to make the asset stream here it's going to strain A PS5 it will be a game that will take every single ounce of horsepower that you can throw at it and unless anything changes there won't be an Xbox Pro and that means that the best place to play the biggest entertainment release of the decade will be the PS5 Pro you might be thinking about PC but remember it's not coming out on PC until later plus sometimes markets are just strange I mean most of us mocked say the PS portal but it's actually ended up selling really really well for Sony and then there's the Apple thing it may seem completely insane that people are just always buying the max phones when really they probably aren't using all of those features but here's the thing say the new iPhone release I looked at that and I thought oh the new the little camera uh control that they have that's like physical Hardware oh that actually probably means I could capture some better shots of my dog when I'm home or family or things like that and that gives me an emotional reason and then there's the trend of ultra high-end products continually doing well I mean we've even seen that in the GPU Market that being said I just don't don't know if the audience exists for this because of the specific cell it just doesn't seem as compelling to me but where I think this can make sense is the bigger context I have a feeling that if they do things right here this could give them a major leap up over Xbox and here's why that kind of makes sense so the PS5 Pro will feed knowledge uh development technology into the ps6 and it's going to help PlayStation further multiplatform plans Mark stery told CET about like working with AMD on you Ray tracing Tech that has not even released on their PC cards he said this it's specifically helping us with PS5 Pro because the games are on high-end PCS so they can look at what they did for several thousand PCS and they can pick and choose what to bring to the PS5 Pro and that kind of means that for them some of the boundary between PC and Playstation for like Fidelity and stuff that that could get thinner but the real trick here is that a lot of this is not a replacement play it's basically another part of an ecosystem the PlayStation are kind of scrabbling to build so that they have got the widest appeal possible they currently exist in a market where component costs mean they cannot do a volume play with the PS5 unless they basically end up losing way too much money on it so they're probably not hinging their whole success in this and chances are they want the learnings from this to help them defeat Xbox again with the PlayStation 6 cuz let's be real Xbox are a part of Microsoft both are not particularly trusted right now and both have been shown to make pretty damn short-term decisions that seem transparently a bad idea in the long term so that could be Sony's play I don't think this will set the world on fire I do think this is a niche product and I think if they wanted this to be bigger they needed a new emotional reason something new exciting that this could do that other stuff couldn't and they just haven't found that key selling point what do you think would you actually consider buying this let me know and I'll See You Again shortly