It's official: consoles cost as much as gaming PCs now
Though I am a PC Gamer, I've always had a lot of love for PlayStation, and even manage to play my PS5 just enough to stop it getting dusty. I preordered that thing in 2020 (which I'd never advise doing) and I don't regret it. Today, Sony announced the price for its new PS5 Pro, and I find myself wondering who exactly it is for.
Coming in at a whopping $700, you do get a lot of graphical power, with that refresh coming in the form of three major factors: a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and AI-driven upscaling. This reportedly offers up to 45% faster rendering, with a larger GPU and faster RAM. This is all to say that it will run your games much better and faster, though you are paying a substantial fee to get it.
The PS5 launch price was $500, but it has dropped up to $50 below that on Amazon, with some bundles even giving you games alongside it. See, the jump from $500 to $700 is about the price where you can invest money into a fully built PC, and here at PC Gamer I'm absolutely going to vouch for that option. At around the $500, you have to get really lucky, or just want to build up a base rig to put a graphics card in. As an example, a quick browse on Newegg shows a capable RTX 4060-equipped rig with 1TB of SSD for just $770. It's also worth pointing out that the PS5 Pro is diskless, meaning the more apt upgrade path is from the diskless version to this, which is a $300 difference.
All right, I admit you're not going to get 60 CUs of AMD GPU in a $700 rig, but it's worth noting that this isn't even the start of a new generation. The Pro PlayStation model has always been a mid-gen refresh, allowing some users to get a little more out of their games before the world moves on to what's next. Taking into account the progress of previous generations of consoles, and current PC hardware, it seems like we will see the PS6 by 2027. With that in mind, you're paying $350 a year to be outclassed by the PS6 in just two years, give or take.
It does seem to have some seriously impressive architecture, and I can't wait to see a little more of what it's got going on under the hood, but it's a lot of money to run games better for just a little while.
The key selling point of a console, as I see it, is its convenience. You don't have to go into the BIOS to troubleshoot something. You don't have to unplug and plug everything else in, hoping that will fix your problem. And, in this sense, if you just have a lot of money and want the very best, I might understand that upfront cost. But the PS5 is entering into the PC's domain with that cost and I don't know if it can keep up, especially with bespoke PC experiences only getting better with time.