Ps5 Pro

(Before I relentlessly shit on this thing, I will admit the design is nice. The Ps5 already has a pretty striking look and this doesn't fuck with that too much so that's good.)

Alright, with the Ps5 Pro being revealed today and everyone giving their own 'hot takes' on the consoles, I'd figured I throw my hat in the ring since, believe or not, I am technically a game journalist (well, aspiring game journalist) The movie reviews were really meant to be more of a side project and a way for me to either glaze a film I really enjoy or vent my feelings on films that bugged me, (or in Borderlands case, kind of just express my feelings on the series as a whole and remind people about the insane amounts of theft that went into making the second one but let me stop myself before I get sidetracked.) Honestly though, as I sit down and really think about this the Ps5 Pro and everything we currently know about it, I find myself more confused by this product than anything else. Let's start with the big sticking point and the part that feels the most ill-conceived, the pricing. Yes, Sony is actually planning to put this thing out into the world at a whopping $700 and that's without a Disk drive or even a fucking vertical stand. Not to mention the worldwide prices are even worse with the UK price being £699.99 which translates to 900 fucking dollars. With this thing being an almost 50% markup from the base Ps5, you'd think it'd at least be a fairly impressive piece of hardware at least but even the demonstrations that Sony offered in their reveal weren’t exactly anything stellar. Now admittedly, Youtube’s video compression probably isn't helping convey the improvements, and the difference in quality is almost certainly going to be much more notable when people get the pro in their hands and get to see the upgrades for themselves, but I still can't help but find what's on offer disappointing when all is said and done. While 2 terabytes of on-board storage are a genuinely valuable upgrade, and the purported 45% faster rendering certainly does sound nice. the Advanced Ray Tracing and A.I upscaling potentially bridging the gap between performance and fidelity modes would normally be a great selling point, it’s worth noting that not all games will be able to take advantage of these new features with several games requires patches to be properly ‘Ps5 Pro enhanced’ as Sony touts it. Not to mention all of these new features still pale in comparison to what modern gaming P.Cs can offer, I know that sounds obvious, consoles have always traded power for convenience and P.Cs vice versa but with Sony charging such an absorbent amount and really pushing the power and capability of their CPU and GPU, I don’t really see who else their targeting other than die-hard gaming enthusiasts who want to get the prettiest, smoothest, possible version of a game they can get but anyone in that mindset probably already own a decent P.C.

Honestly, the whole announcement of the Ps5 Pro smacks of pure, unbridled, entitlement. Sony knows they’ve essentially ‘won’ the high-end console market as it were. Sure, Nintendo sells more than them but the Big N beats to its own drum and attends to target a ‘blue ocean’ audience that Sony doesn’t seem as interested in. Not to mention a lot of gamers usually buy a Nintendo consoles for first-party titles and indies while double-dipping into P.C or something more powerful like a PlayStation for the big third-party stuff. Microsoft hasn’t been adequate competition in quite some time, essentially throwing up their hands and saying ‘fuck it’ by putting most of their games on P.C and PlayStation, seemingly putting more of their focus into Gamepass and milking Call of Duty and Candy Crush for every cent their worth now that they own Activision-Blizzard. Sony has essentially cornered the market on traditional console hardware, they’re like Google with search engines. Sure, there are alternatives but be honest folks, you’re probably not using Bing unless you’ve already Googled something and not gotten the result who want. Not many even remember Yahoo still exists, and if I asked anyone under 20 what Ask Jeeves was, I think they may look at me as if I’m speaking an alien language. PlayStation is in the same boat; they’ve conquered their most comparable direct competitor, and while they’ve tried to carve away some Nintendo’s market share with the PlayStation Move and not one but two handhelds, Sony eventually gave up when they realized they actually needed to market the PlayStation Vita for it to sell. At this point, there’s not a lot of avenues for growth that Sony hasn’t tapped so why not try winning over some P.C gamers who aren’t usually into console gaming. Problem is, Sony still expects the same amount of reverence and brand loyalty that they’ve enjoyed from the console crowd. Looking at the Ps5 Pro reveal, it feels as if someone at Sony figured if they flash a few fancy screenshots and distract people with some cool-sounding buzzwords then hope no-one notices that they’re charging an obscene amount of money. Even the way they announced the price felt like they were just thought they could just slide that one past and ran away like someone who broke wind in an elevator. The way the price quickly popped on screen right before the show ended felt like a sucker punch right before someone slams their door in your face, with the little ‘vertical stand not included’ being an extra sting to top it all off.

(Considering that Sony announced that the Ps5 is going to offer a 'Game Boost' feature that allows the Pro to enhance select Ps4 games. I wonder if this is how Sont finally offers a 60fps version of Bloodborne. To be entirely truthful, that might be one of the strongest selling points you could give this thing...so Sony will probably not enhance Bloodborne for some ridiculous reason, of course.)

  Now, with that said, the reason this strategy confuses me a little is that I don’t understand how on Earth Sony thinks this will work. P.C players have already invested hundreds upon hundreds of dollars into machines that not only play games but can act as all-in machines for work, play, and everything in between. Meanwhile, most Ps5 owners I’ve met complain more about Sony’s lackluster game output than they do the console itself. The base Ps5 is already a fairly capable machine as far as consoles go, the problem isn’t the power, it’s the fact that there’s barely any games that take advantage of that power. There’re several current gen games that still have last gen ports or are purposely paired down to fit on weaker alternatives such as the X-Box Series S or less capable graphic cards, and again, for people who really want their games to look and play in their most impressive forms then they’re not gonna invest in a console. Most people look to consoles as the easy way to play games, the method that involves popping in a game, maybe downloading an update and jumping straight into the fray. I don’t think there’s a lot of people who are necessarily looking for a high-end console so much as they’re looking for a console that actually has something worthwhile to fucking play. That’s another thing that feels ill-advised about the Ps5 Pro being announced at this particular time, Sony didn’t really have a showcase game to really emphasize what this console can really do. As I said, the comparison to current Ps5 games weren’t all that impressive but perhaps if this had some must-have game coming around its launch then maybe it would be easier to market the Pro alongside it as an example of stellar software that benefits from the extra power. Good example of this is the Switch Oled which had Metroid Dread release in a similar timeframe, Metroid’s Dread vibrant color scheme and pitch-black environments perfect displayed what the Oled screen was capable and why it was preferable, nay why it was practically required to play Metroid Dread on an Oled screen. The fact the Ps5 Pro doesn’t have that star game is just another little mistake on the dizzying pile Sony has made with this announcement in my opinion and the more I think about the way they chose to go about this, the more problems I find myself having with it.

Now, with that said, the reason this strategy confuses me a little is that I don’t understand how on Earth Sony thinks this will work. P.C players have already invested hundreds upon hundreds of dollars into machines that not only play games but can act as all-in machines for work, play, and everything in between. Meanwhile, most Ps5 owners I’ve met complain more about Sony’s lackluster game output than they do the console itself. The base Ps5 is already a fairly capable machine as far as consoles go, the problem isn’t the power, it’s the fact that there’s barely any games that take advantage of that power. There’re several current gen games that still have last gen ports or are purposely paired down to fit on weaker alternatives such as the X-Box Series S or less capable graphic cards, and again, for people who really want their games to look and play in their most impressive forms then they’re not gonna invest in a console. Most people look to consoles as the easy way to play games, the method that involves popping in a game, maybe downloading an update and jumping straight into the fray. I don’t think there’s a lot of people who are necessarily looking for a high-end console so much as they’re looking for a console that actually has something worthwhile to fucking play. That’s another thing that feels ill-advised about the Ps5 Pro being announced at this particular time, Sony didn’t really have a showcase game to really emphasize what this console can really do. As I said, the comparison to current Ps5 games weren’t all that impressive but perhaps if this had some must-have game coming around its launch then maybe it would be easier to market the Pro alongside it as an example of stellar software that benefits from the extra power. Good example of this is the Switch Oled which had Metroid Dread release in a similar timeframe, Metroid’s Dread vibrant color scheme and pitch-black environments perfect displayed what the Oled screen was capable and why it was preferable, nay why it was practically required to play Metroid Dread on an Oled screen. The fact the Ps5 Pro doesn’t have that star game is just another little mistake on the dizzying pile Sony has made with this announcement in my opinion and the more I think about the way they chose to go about this, the more problems I find myself having with it.


    

(Metroid Dread really went with the Switch Oled like Peanut butter with chocolate. Some the black backgrounds looked genuinely pitch black on the Oled, which made the colors of the surrounding areas pop all the more. The Ps5 Pro really needs a game that accentuates its strength in the way Dread did for the Switch Oled.)

Now, with that said, the reason this strategy confuses me a little is that I don’t understand how on Earth Sony thinks this will work. P.C players have already invested hundreds upon hundreds of dollars into machines that not only play games but can act as all-in machines for work, play, and everything in between. Meanwhile, most Ps5 owners I’ve met complain more about Sony’s lackluster game output than they do the console itself. The base Ps5 is already a fairly capable machine as far as consoles go, the problem isn’t the power, it’s the fact that there’s barely any games that take advantage of that power. There’re several current gen games that still have last gen ports or are purposely paired down to fit on weaker alternatives such as the X-Box Series S or less capable graphic cards, and again, for people who really want their games to look and play in their most impressive forms then they’re not gonna invest in a console. Most people look to consoles as the easy way to play games, the method that involves popping in a game, maybe downloading an update and jumping straight into the fray. I don’t think there’s a lot of people who are necessarily looking for a high-end console so much as they’re looking for a console that actually has something worthwhile to fucking play. That’s another thing that feels ill-advised about the Ps5 Pro being announced at this particular time, Sony didn’t really have a showcase game to really emphasize what this console can really do. As I said, the comparison to current Ps5 games weren’t all that impressive but perhaps if this had some must-have game coming around its launch then maybe it would be easier to market the Pro alongside it as an example of stellar software that benefits from the extra power. Good example of this is the Switch Oled which had Metroid Dread release in a similar timeframe, Metroid’s Dread vibrant color scheme and pitch-black environments perfect displayed what the Oled screen was capable and why it was preferable, nay why it was practically required to play Metroid Dread on an Oled screen. The fact the Ps5 Pro doesn’t have that star game is just another little mistake on the dizzying pile Sony has made with this announcement in my opinion and the more I think about the way they chose to go about this, the more problems I find myself having with it.

(While I'm sure the improvements will be more apparent in person, I'm just not seeing a huge upgrade here. Is anyone else?)

At the end of the day, I don’t want to completely write of the Ps5 Pro, perhaps it really be a significant enough next step as to warrant the price point. Fuck, maybe it will be the next must-have consoles and games on the Pro will feel so much better that I just couldn’t go back to anything else, but I quite frankly doubt it and from the looks of it, I’m not alone in that sentiment. People turned against this thing the minute that price was shown off and fingers crossed that this thing bombs hard enough in initial sales that Sony is forced to cut the price by 50-100 dollars, or at the very least include a fucking Disk Drive and Vertical Stand within the future. As it is, the Ps5 Pro is in the ultimate sour spot, it’s too expensive and doesn’t actually address the major problems that most current Ps5 owners have with Sony and it’s not a powerful enough piece of hardware to attract hardcore P.C gamers who want to get the most out of their game library. It’s just this weird middle ground that ends up trying to please both console and P.C players only to end up pleasing no-one. Who knows, perhaps this thing will be a surprise success but I ain’t putting money on it, mostly because I’ll need that money for a vertical stand and a disk drive apparently. Welp, that’s about all I have to say, until next time, stay tuned and Krank up the noise with whatever fancy binaural audio your overpriced console can muster up, see ya soon!