The PS5 Pro already felt like an overpriced upgrade when it launched at $699 in November 2024. Right from the start, it cemented itself as a premium offering for gamers who want to get the best of visuals and performance in every game they play. Only recently, with an updated version of PSSR, has it finally reached that potential with gorgeous presentation you can’t find on any other console. Unfortunately, it also coincides with a mammoth price hike.
From today onward, every single PlayStation 5 console has increased in price to meet the increasing costs of technical components required to make them. RAM, memory, and other parts are more expensive thanks to corporations building data centres, and Sony is passing that cost onto the user instead of tanking it to maintain goodwill. Considering the PS5 line of consoles has already increased in price several times at this point, it doesn’t come as a huge surprise. But man, does it suck.
We’re Running Out Of Reasons To Care About PlayStation
Everything is getting more expensive. The food we eat, the fuel we put in our cars, and the entertainment products we buy to make the voices in our heads quiet down for a few precious minutes. Video games used to be a relatively affordable luxury with a number of consoles available on the market at a variety of different price points. The variety is still there, but even the very cheapest option feels prohibitively expensive to a lot of people nowadays.
When I was growing up and PS2 was all the rage, the PS1 was reduced in price and became a cheaper option with an extensive library of games still well worth your time. This trend was maintained across the next several console generations until reaching a sudden end point in recent years. The PS4 was left behind without much obvious worth to replace it. The PS5 remains a great console, but it came out almost six years ago and has only risen in price with fewer worthwhile exclusives from Sony to justify its existence.
There are few major blockbusters on the horizon, and suddenly you are asking consumers to pay an extra $100 or more for the latest video game console to not play those nonexistent games on. It doesn’t make logical sense, even with how tumultuous the technology market is right now.
Chances are these people will just walk away, or not bother investing in the world of PlayStation again when the next generation comes along or their console suddenly stops working. The past generation of PlayStation has been defined by studio closures, disgusting price hikes, and a distinct lack of games worth playing outside live-service juggernauts.
Note: We used to live in a world where console prices decreasing over time was seen as a guaranteed constant. If you couldn’t invest at launch, the hardware would come down to your level at some point, but early adopters could play games first. This is how large and loyal audiences were once built.
Even compared to the PS4, which was already feeling the influence of unsustainable dev times and budgets, there was still a generous number of excellent games to experience on the console you couldn’t find anywhere else. Sony was still taking chances on new ideas or experimenting with things outside the same tired take on triple-A cinematic prestige. Horizon, Spider-Man, and the God of War reboot had all arrived by this relative point in the PS4’s life cycle with a dozen others.
But now that time has passed, and moving into the latter half of this year, I can count the overall number of exclusives on one hand. As a mainstream consumer, why bother picking up the PS5 or continue playing the console you already own when things are this dire?
What Does The PS5 Price Increase Mean For The PS6?
PlayStation used to be a bastion of originality in the console space who would release great new games like Bloodborne, Gravity Rush, and Concrete Genie. Now it is just a company renowned for raising hardware prices, closing studios, and canceling projects. It remains my console of choice due to some ingrained feeling of brand loyalty and working far better than Xbox on a user interface level, but otherwise, I just don’t know what to think anymore. Even if it is seen as the premium offering, $900 is a ludicrous amount of money for the PS5 Pro. It’s reached a point where I can either buy a video game console or pay my rent for the month. That’s messed up!
Even thinking about the PS6 right now feels like a foolish thing to do, but I have to imagine it is already deep into development. We’re reaching the end of the current console generation if past examples are anything to go by, and development plans for the PS6 were most likely underway long before the troubles currently aiding the video game world.
Xbox is doing the same, and has been far more upfront about the fact its next console will be a hybrid of sorts between a traditional console and PC. It, for all of its massive flaws, at least has a vision I can picture in mind, but it’s impossible to say the same about PlayStation right now. After botching the release of PlayStation VR 2 and failing to take advantage of its huge pool of IP and talented studios over the past generation, there is nothing that excited me for the next generation beyond the distant promise of Astro Bot 2. And no matter how good that potential masterpiece winds up being, will it be enough to justify a console that at this rate is going to cost $1,000? I don’t think so.
Consoles used to be the gateway into video games, but now they are becoming a premium hobby with fewer triple-A offerings than ever before. You either sink all your hours into a live service, rely entirely on older games, or watch this hardware gather dust. PlayStation used to be on top of the world, and in the console world it technically still is, but it’s hard to view it as anything but a shadow of its former self.
- Brand
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Sony PlayStation
- Original Release Date
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November 7, 2024
- Original MSRP (USD)
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$749.99
- Processor
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AMD Ryzen Zen 2 (8 cores, 16 threads, 3.5GHz)
