Sony has officially unveiled the PlayStation 5 Pro, a beefier version of their four-year-old console that boasts the ability to play games at both a higher graphical fidelity and a higher frame rate.
It costs £699.
Fuck me.
I don’t love my PlayStation 5. It is the most boring game console I have ever owned by a wide margin, offering little in the way of notable features or exciting quirks. It allows me to play PlayStation games, and sometimes the controller rumbles a bit more aggressively compared to other controllers I own.
This is fine. Considering the PlayStation 4’s complete domination of the eighth console generation, I did not expect Sony’s next box to be anything other than safe. Although I would have very much enjoyed another PlayStation 3-style bold swing, it makes sense why the PlayStation 5 is not that, and is instead a box that sits under my TV and lets me play Spider-Man.
But after owning one for four years, I cannot for the life of me imagine why I would want to spend nearly double what I paid for the original model on a slightly more powerful version. It is an unfathomable concept that makes me feel insane.
As a result of industry turbulence, supply chain issues and that there pandemic we all suffered through, the PlayStation 5 has had a slower start to a generation than any other I can think of. Outside of a small handful of exclusives, the majority of games I have bought for the PS5 have also been released for the PS4, an 11-year-old system that struggled to run Minecraft Story Mode without sounding like a jet engine fingering a blender. The idea that Sony expects me to hoy my PS5 – a console that only has nine actual true exclusives to its name – into a river in favour of something else is laughably misjudged.
When the PlayStation 4 Pro was announced, I was quite excited by the prospect of playing that console’s ample library of exclusives in 4K. As I didn’t own a 4K TV in 2016, I held off for three years until A) I did and B) my launch model PS4 grew so weary of being alive that it began to vomit discs across my living room in protest.
My main motivation for this upgrade (other than the faulty disc drive issue) was that Remedy’s Control ran like ass on a base PS4. Like the loyal, trusting consumer that I am, I expected that purchasing a PlayStation 4 Pro would be the solution to playing this graphically demanding game at a frame rate above 20. After dropping hundreds of pounds on the Pro, I was delighted to discover that Control still ran like ass. It wasn’t until the game launched on PS5, in 2021, that I was finally able to finish it.
I have no Control equivalent on the PlayStation 5. As I said, most games I own run decently well on the very same Pro console that struggled to run Control. I am not desperate to see Ratchet & Clank, God of War or (the terminally bland) Spider-Man 2 upscaled to a crisper resolution thanks to a neat AI algorithm. It’s the same game under there, and it works perfectly fine on the box I already own.
Forgive me, then, for not rushing to pre-order the PlayStation 5 Pro, a console that costs £699 (stand and disc drive sold separately). Asking me to do so during a console generation so dull, a console generation that feels like it has barely hobbled off the starting line, is so utterly ridiculous I can only assume it’s a joke.
A joke where the punchline is seemingly: “Please spend £699 to play an enhanced version of The Last Of Us: Part II Remastered”, which – in Sony’s defence – is pretty fucking funny.