PS5 Pro Drops at $700 and Gamers Are Having a Full-Blow Existential Crisis Over a Console That Plays the Same Games
Look, I get it. We’ve all been waiting for Sony to drop the nuclear option—a souped-up PS5 that doesn’t sound like a jet engine taking off during a loading screen and actually lets you see the pores on a character’s face from two miles away. The rumors have been swirling for months like a digital dust devil, promising everything from ray tracing that could make a Pixar movie blush to frame rates so smooth they’d make butter feel jealous.
So when Sony finally unveiled the PS5 Pro yesterday with a slick, curated trailer featuring more lens flares than a J.J. Abrams film, the collective gamer hive mind did what it always does: it lost its goddamn mind. But not for the reasons you’d think.
The price tag hit the internet like a rotten tomato to the face: $699.99. Seven hundred American dollars. That’s rent money in some midwestern cities. That’s two weeks of groceries for a family of four. That’s the kind of money that makes you question every life choice you’ve made since you decided that buying a $70 controller was a reasonable expense.
And for what, exactly? To play Spider-Man 2 in 8K? Cool, but I don’t have an 8K TV because I’m not a Saudi prince. To get 60 frames per second in Elden Ring? That’s nice, but the base PS5 already does that if you’re not a pixel-peeping psychopath who needs to see every individual blade of grass rendered in 4K HDR.
The internet, being the rational and level-headed place it always is, immediately split into three distinct camps.
Camp One: The Hype Train Conductors. These are the people who already have their pre-order tabs open and are ready to drop a mortgage payment on a console that plays the exact same games as the one they already own. They’re the same people who bought the iPhone 14 Pro Max when they had the iPhone 13 Pro Max and couldn’t tell you a single difference besides the camera bump being slightly larger. They’re the backbone of Sony’s quarterly earnings, and they deserve a medal for their dedication to consumerism. Or a lobotomy. Probably both.
Camp Two: The Rational Adults. These folks are looking at their current PS5, which still works perfectly fine, and wondering if they can justify $700 for slightly shinier pixels. They’re the ones who remember the PS4 Pro and how it was a nice upgrade but didn’t fundamentally change the gaming experience. They’re the ones who look at their backlog of unplayed games and realize they haven’t even finished God of War Ragnarök yet, so maybe, just maybe, they don’t need to spend $700 on a console that will make the same game look 15% better.
Camp Three: The Angry Reddit Mob. This is where the real entertainment lives. These are the people who are currently writing 3,000-word essays on r/gaming about how Sony has “lost the plot,” how this is “the end of console gaming,” and how they’re going to “build a PC that will blow this thing out of the water for half the price.” Which, if you’ve ever actually built a PC in the last three years, you know is a complete lie. A $700 PC will get you a graphics card that’s roughly equivalent to a PS5’s performance, and that’s before you factor in the CPU, RAM, motherboard, power supply, and the fact that you’ll need to take out a second mortgage for a decent monitor.
But the real kicker? The PS5 Pro doesn’t even come with a disc drive. No, that’s an extra $80 accessory. Sony is charging $700 for a digital-only console, and if you want to play your physical game collection, you need to shell out another $80 for a peripheral that should have been included in the box. That’s $780 for a console that plays the same games as the $450 model you can still buy at Target. It’s like buying a Ferrari that doesn’t come with wheels.
And let’s talk about the actual specs because Sony’s marketing team has clearly been taking lessons from the “just throw more numbers at it” school of tech communication. The PS5 Pro has a GPU with 45% faster rendering, advanced ray tracing, and AI-driven upscaling called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR). Sounds impressive, right? It basically means your games will look slightly better and run slightly smoother, but you won’t actually notice unless you’re playing on a $3,000 OLED TV and have the eyesight of a hawk with laser eye surgery.
The biggest selling point is that the PS5 Pro will support 60 FPS in games that previously ran at 30 FPS on the base model. That’s actually a big deal. The difference between 30 and 60 frames per second is the difference between wading through molasses and actually playing a video game. But here’s the thing: the base PS5 can already do 60 FPS in most games. It just can’t do it while also maintaining 4K resolution and ray tracing. So the Pro is basically saying, “Hey, you can have all the fancy graphics AND smooth gameplay, but you need to pay us $700 for the privilege.”
And the exclusives? There aren’t any. The PS5 Pro doesn’t have any games you can’t play on the base PS5. It’s purely a performance upgrade. Sony is essentially asking you to buy a new console to play the same games you’re already playing, just with slightly prettier graphics.
The comparison to the PS4 Pro is inevitable, and it’s not flattering. The PS4 Pro launched at $399 in 2016, which was $100 more than the base PS4. That was a 33% price increase for a clear visual upgrade. The PS5 Pro is a 55% price increase over the base PS5
Final Thoughts
Having spent years watching console cycles swing between ambition and pragmatism, the PS5 Pro feels less like a generational leap and more like a meticulous refinement for the pixel-obsessed elite. While its hardware grunt can finally deliver the stable 4K/60fps or ray-traced immersion that the base model struggled to sustain, the premium price tag positions it as a niche luxury rather than a must-have upgrade for the average player. Ultimately, Sony is betting that the hardcore crowd will pay a premium for polish, but the real test will be whether this mid-cycle refresh justifies its cost in an era where diminishing returns on graphical fidelity are becoming harder to ignore.