Gamers were very surprised to learn the price of the PS5 Pro. Rumors suggested it could be around $500, but Sony went much more expensive. The mid-generation console refresh will be available in retail stores from November 7 at $700 (€800 in Europe), and that’s without the disc drive and vertical stand. By comparison, the PlayStation 4 Pro only cost $/€ 399, the same as the base PlayStation 4 at launch.
Will this massive price hike hurt the sales of the PS5 Pro? We asked our good friend Rhys Elliott, a Games Industry Analyst at MIDiA Research. Elliott provided a detailed answer, explaining that this is a product for ‘superfans’ that could however still end up selling between 13 and 15 million consoles by the end of this generation.
The price point was in line with what I expected, as the PS5 Pro is a premium product for highly engaged fans. But $700 is the ceiling for what Sony is offering here – it’s a sweet spot that highly engaged players would be receptive to. These players have shown time and time again that they’re willing to pay an extra $200 to complement their experience, say with a high-end controller or PlayStation Portal. Anything higher than $700 would obviously have resulted in even more backlash, however.
If PlayStation and Xbox could turn back the clock, they’d probably have priced their base consoles at $600 at launch. Just look at Xbox’s $600 dollar 2TB Galaxy Black Edition. While that console has a Blu-ray drive, besides more storage it essentially has the same specs as the launch Series X. A $100-more PlayStation 5 Pro without a disk drive does not seem outrageously priced next to the Galaxy Black Series X.
This is highly dependent on supply, of course, and how well new games implement the new features. But if there are enough PS5 Pros to go around, I could see it selling in line with the PS4 Pro when all is said and done. Depending on how long the current generation lasts, I wouldn’t be surprised to see 13-15 million PS5 Pros sold by the end of the generation.
Sony’s $700 PS5 Pro is for superfans – it won’t really grow PlayStation’s playerbase. Still, depending on supply, I expect the PS5 Pro to sell well among this intended audience. It’s true that the PS5 Pro doesn’t have a use case as strong as the PS4 Pro’s (4K HDR at a time when consumer penetration of 4K TVs was rising). But it was shrewd of Sony to poke the pain point of having to choose between fidelity and performance modes – a reality for many latest-gen console players. That’s a value proposition that might even get the fence-sitting superfans to bite.
There are also some 50 million PS4 users looking for a reason to upgrade. Some of that group might bite the $700 bullet and enter at the PS5 Pro. Sony would be shrewd to market the console as “the best way to play Grand Theft Auto 6”, ahead of GTA 6’s culture-shaking launch.
A PS5 Pro bundled with GTA 6 would work even better. Sony released special-branded PS4 Pros for first-party games (Spider-Man) and third-party ones (Monster Hunter), so we expect a similar strategy for the PS5 Pro. What’s more, third-party games, including the imminent Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Monster Hunter Wilds, and GTA 6 are now launching new-generation only. The success of the new-gen only EA Sports College Football 25 has shown just how powerful new-gen games are in getting consumers to upgrade.
There are reasons for last-generation holdouts to upgrade, and they might land on the slightly more expensive PS5 Pro (the base model will not get a price cut). But the point remains: the PS5 Pro is for the highly engaged enthusiasts. There is a market for it, and a lot of the people complaining online simply are not part of that market.
All in all, we expect that the PS5 Pro will have a direct positive impact on hardware sales and will also trickle into software spending. However, the impact will be relatively small overall, and the Pro won’t lead to much user acquisition for PlayStation. It will keep those ever-valuable power users more engaged, though, and offers a small window into Sony’s technical headspace ahead of the PlayStation 6 generation.
