I am sure marketing folk have a reason for it but… this really feels like the kind of thing you put alongside the PS5 Pro announcement that the entire planet watched. Rather than leaving everyone wondering “so… why would I buy a ps5 pro?”
I bet they’ll focus hard on the PS5 Pro this showcase to try and win back some people. Excited to see new game announcements though. I wonder if Naughty Dog will have anything new or if they’re still in last of us hell.
Just for fun: this would have worked so much better if they price dropped the PS5 and introduced the PS5 Pro at the old price.
People are anchored into thinking the PS5 is a certain value, and if they did that, it would instantly make the PS5 Pro and the PS5 appear to be a bargain, and so much of the PS5-owning public would have bought another system because it would be “such a good deal,” while PS5 fence-sitters would jump at the core system. I’m not trained to say for sure, but I think while their profit margin would be lower they’d be making much more money.
I was very pissed there was no disk drive, but at least you can get it as an add-on like the Slim version (ended up reading at their blog post, don’t understand how they didn’t mention it during the stream). The 2TB SSD makes it very tempting since we have the digital version and we were looking to get a disk one.
They didn’t mention it, because they want most buyers to use their subscription service and only purchase digital games, which have larger margins, no second-hand market, don’t drop in price as quickly and as often, can be delisted and removed, etc.
I’ve seen disk PS5 go on sale as low as $400USD at big box retailers, presumably to make shelf space for the pros. The used marketplace is there as well.
That announcement stream was so weird. 4 minutes of Mark Cerny talking about the features of the PS5 like it didn’t come out 4 years ago, 3 minutes of explaining the PS5 Pro “Big 3” features of GPU upgrade, advanced ray tracing, and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, and 2 minutes of trailers that looked too (heh) similar to current PS5 gameplay. It’s like they know that it’s impossible to make a new console look good in trailers anymore, so they just rushed to get it over with because everyone has already decided whether or not they want to pay even more for an upgraded PS5.
At least the price for the base PS5 should come down on the used market?
I guess my thinking was that people will sell their base PS5 after they buy the Pro, and basic supply-and-demand says that more PS5’s on the used market equals lower prices. It might not come down a lot, but I think it will come down.
We are at a point of extreme diminishing returns when it comes to video game visuals. Not saying that games can’t look better than they already do, but the improvements are miniscule.
Honestly, it's pretty far into the PS5's lifecycle at this point. I think a PS5 Pro this late into the current generation would be a bad move, because a PS6 is undoubtedly around the corner in just a few years and will effectively obsolesce a PS5 Pro, anyway.
If they released a Pro version last year, that'd make more sense. But unless Sony's expecting this generation to stretch out longer than normal, this just doesn't seem like a good idea.
Whoa, I didn't know that. The Dreamcast's 9/9/99 launch date in North America is so memorable, I had no idea that the Playstation came out exactly four years earlier. So there are two birthdays today!
Lots of people feel this way. This thing is going to come in at a price around $650 or $700, sell pretty much exclusively to the people who need the latest high-end PlayStation regardless, and then free up a bit of inventory of second hand vanilla PS5s. It’s a way to justify keeping prices high, because they can’t afford to lower them.
blog.playstation.com
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