The high price ($699) of the PS5 Pro remains a hotly debated subject in the industry. While many fans are still disappointed with the pricing, analysts and even game developers have publicly said it makes sense, considering the market and what’s in the hardware.
As for Sony itself, the company recently commented on the topic of pricing (and the decision to leave the disc drive as a separate purchase) in an interview with IGN. PlayStation Senior Principal Product Manager Toshi Aoki said:
Well, the technologies that I just mentioned that we are putting in to deliver new experiences for game players, and also not just the technological differences, but the SSD, the Wi-Fi 7, and the new technologies that surround the gameplay as well. So it’s more of a full package that will give that exceptional value to the players… the most engaged players that we’re targeting.
With the PS5 Pro, we are offering all these new tech innovations, and we added the two terabyte SSD, as well as the Wi-Fi 7. We believe as a full package that it offers for the most players. For the disc drive, it is an option for players. Not all players have discs, even though most players may…but we have the option for being able to add that for those players. So I think it’s more of the balance of the value proposition that we’re giving.
Interestingly, Aoki also confirmed that Sony had been working on the PS5 Pro even before the base console launched in November 2020.
We started discussing it before the PS5 actually came out…because the PS5 specs were already locked in. We were ready to launch and everything. We knew, of course, as you mentioned, technologies evolve every year.
The PlayStation 5 Pro will be released on November 7 for $699 / £699 / €799, featuring 67% more Compute Units than the base PS5 as well as the machine learning DLSS-like antialiasing reconstruction technique called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR). Moreover, its ray tracing capabilities are vastly superior, thanks to improved ray tracing technology borrowed from unreleased AMD graphics cards following Sony’s push.
