This week, Sony announced that the rumors were true: there is indeed a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation 5 Pro in the works, and it will hit stor🍸e shelves on November 7, with pre-orders opening up on September 26.

The PS5 Pro Gets An Amateurish Pitch

This should be exciting news for the tiny subset of players who have been clamoring for an upgrade. And yet,൲ Sony seems to be doing everything possible to make this mid-gen refresh unattractive. The price is the biggest sticking point, as the console is set to retail for $699.99 in the United States, £699.99 in Britain, and €799.99 in the EU. That price is ridiculously high. The original PS5 went for ꦐ$499 ($399 for the discless version) at launch in the U.S. Despite retailing for $200 more, the PS5 Pro is offering less than its predecessor in key ways.

Most importantly, it 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:doesn't come with a disc drive. If you want to play physical games, you'll need to spend an additional $79.99 to buy one. If you're a little freaked out by games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Concord getting Thanos snapped, the PS5 Pro is set to make it even easier for Sony to do takesies-backsies on games it wishes it hadn't released. It doesn't come with a stand, either, which is less important in the grand scheme of things, but adds to the sense that you're paying a high price for a product that is unashamedly cutting corners.

The Pro will obviously do some things better than the PS5, like offering 2TBs of storage, a big help for players who want to have more than a few triple-A games installed at any one time. It's got a better GPU, will trace even more rays, and is using AI (whatever that means in this instance) to upscale background details in games. This is a mid-gen refresh, so I wasn't expecting Sony to offer the bells-and-whistles you expect with an all-new console. But this is, undeniably, a pretty unimpressive offering, and the pricing makes it laughable.

Related
ꦛ So⭕ny Is Trying To Sell Us A $700 Console With Games We’ve Already Played

The PS5 Pro fails to justify its own existence.

8

Innovation In The 2020s Means Charging More Money For Worse Products

But it's easy to understand if you look at broader trends in how large corporations increasingly relate to their consumers. In 2022, the sci-fi author Cory Doctorow introduced an idea called ‘’ which is more or less what it sounds like. When he coined the term, Doctorow was referring to the process by which online platforms like Facebook and Google become worse over time, prioritizing profits over the needs of their consumers. Think about how, in the early days of YouTube, you could watch as much as you wanted to without seeing a single ad. Think about how in order to get the basic Netflix experience from five years ago, you now need to pay for a premium subscription. Think about how your Google results are clogged with AI-generated answers that often don't actually answer your questions.

In all of those cases, the companies got away with it due to a lack of viable competition. This is what the PS5 Pro pitch reminds me of. Sure, some aspects of the new machine are better than the old one. But in other ways, it's a degraded experience, removing long-standing features like the disc drive because Sony knows it can make you pay for it if you really want it. Xbox seems to have given up on competing so Sony feels that it can get away with this k🌼ind of anti-consumer move. What are y🔯ou gonna do about it?

The PS5 Pro against a white background

The online reaction to the console has been overwhelmingly negative. I scrolled and scrolled through the comments under and the closest I could find to a positive response was someone calling people hypocritical for expecting a game console to come with a stand and a disc drive when phone manufacturers no longer include chargers in the box. And that actually points to the broader problem that the PS5 Pro is highlighting. With phones and online platforms and apartments and groceries and, now, consoles, consumers are being charged more for less and are expected not just to be okay with it, but to happily buy the next new product the moment it's available. This expensive consumer product is materially offering less to buyers than what they got four years ago. Sure there are visual upgrades, but we've long since passed the point of diminishing returns and it's impossible to sell that kind of granular detail over a live stream.

The PS5 Pro might be the most powerful console Sony has ever made. But the corporation is attempting to sell it with one of the least powerful pitches I've ever seen.

Next
Remaster Astro Bot Rescue Mission, You Cow🏅ards

With Astro Bot's newfound popularity, its first VR outing deserves to find a b💧igger audience

3