#280: Pro lapse

Yesterday Sony announced the long-rumoured PlayStation 5 Pro, a frighteningly expensive hardware revision that offers purchasers with a sufficiently severe money/sense imbalance a beefier GPU, a bigger hard drive, fancier ray-tracing and a DLSS-style machine-learning upscaling solution. It will retail for — and if you've somehow not seen the price yet, I suggest you sit down before reading on — $700 in the US, €800 in the Eurozone, and £700 in the UK. Yegods.

Not included are a disc drive (£100 to you, sir, you absolute mug), the vertical stand (£25!!), or any emotional or financial support when your significant other gets wind of what you’ve bought and, entirely reasonably, throws you out on your arse. I would have more chance of getting another lawnmower past Mrs Hit Points than I would a £700 console and — and apologies for saying this a few times in today’s edition — I do this for a bloody living. Even with a vested professional interest in chaining myself to game technology’s bleeding edge, I find the idea of spending £700 on a console, and this console in particular, simply absurd.

To get the obvious stuff out of the way, this is arguably not such a ridiculous price in an era of thousand-pound phones, of £1,500 graphics cards that are only going to get more expensive as Nvidia gets even fatter off the machine-learning boom, or of an inflation crisis that means $700 today is worth about the same as $550 was in 2020. I am typing this edition on what, when I bought it last year, was a top-of-the-line gaming PC; it cost more than five times as much as PS5 Pro will. And hell, Microsoft is about to release a special-edition Series X, with no improvements over the launch model besides a 2TB SSD and a fancy paint job, for $600. Things are expensive these days, in case you hadn't noticed, and Sony’s made it pretty clear over the last few years that it considers its target market to be sufficiently well-off to take the hit(s) on this stuff. I suppose I could spend today’s edition talking about how this is normal, actually, and all very correct and good. But it isn’t, so let’s not.

The console was announced by PlayStation’s boffin-in-chief, Mark Cerny. He was on typical form, purring away in that comely manner of his about rendering speeds and ray-traced reflections, showing off what £700 worth of marginal gains looks like by applying 4x zoom to side-by-side videos of your Ratchets and Gran Turismos in a fun/squinty game of Spot The Difference. He pitched the Pro as bridging the gap between the Quality and Performance modes that have so wearyingly become the triple-A standard over the last half-decade; the new console, it seems, will be able to give you the fidelity of the former at the framerates of the latter. This is better than nothing, certainly, but hardly enough to get the watching masses reaching for their credit cards.

Something really jumped out at me from Cerny’s presentation, though it has nothing to do with pixel counts or fancy reflections. It’s his claim that developers tell him they wish PS5 had more graphics power — and his subsequent reference to data showing that, when given a choice between Quality or Performance modes, players are choosing the latter 75% of the time. I can see the logic in trying to please both camps by making a sort of console version of the Why Not Both meme, though I wonder to what extent Sony has considered the alternative interpretation of these two opposing data points. If developers can’t hit their desired graphical heights without compromising on performance… but players are more motivated by fluid, responsive gameplay than shiny graphics by a factor of three to one… maybe… maybe graphics are bad, actually? Maybe the rampantly increasing budgets and project timelines about which the industry so loudly frets, and on which its tens of thousands of recent layoffs have been widely blamed, could have been avoided if people in the business of making and selling games were a little more in tune with what their customers are actually looking for? This is interesting, knotty stuff, but not a conversation Mark Cerny, or Sony, are interested in having and look, fair enough. You probably don’t come out of that discussion with a $700 console to sell.

Late last year a group of hackers broke into Insomniac Games' servers and, after the developer refused to pay the group’s requested ransom, leaked a bunch of the studio’s confidential internal documents online. There’s a bit in there that’s been stuck in my head ever since, a Powerpoint slide querying whether Spider-Man 2’s increased budget — $300m to its predecessor’s $100m — represented value for money: “Is 3x the investment evident to anyone who plays the game?” A rhetorical question if ever I saw one. It popped back into my head again yesterday, as Cerny did his ‘computer, enhance!’ thing to side-by-side videos of Ratchet & Clank, showing how far back Insomniac had needed to dial the game’s foliage density to hit the Performance mode framerate target on the launch-model PS5. The difference Cerny showed was noticeable, don’t get me wrong, but I do not remember my time with Ratchet & Clank‘s Performance mode being in any way spoiled by the reduced amount of grass on the ground, or the fuzzy detail of a background crowd scene Cerny also touted as justifying the new console’s existence. I did not, and do not, notice these things and, once again, I do this for a living. What percentage of us see this stuff without having someone else point it out to us? And how many of those people think these ‘problems’ are worth paying £700 to fix?

Sorry for coming back to the price again, but that really is my issue here. If Cerny was showing us all those videos while trying to sell us a £400 console, rather than a £700 one, then… maybe I’d go for it? Maybe you would too. We all like a shiny new toy; there is nothing quite so exciting in this hobby of ours as a new hardware release. But the market has its limits. Phil Spencer admitted a while ago that Microsoft had shelved its plans for a dedicated cloud-gaming box, despite having a working prototype up and running, because it couldn’t be manufactured, and therefore sold, at a price the market would bear. Say what you want about Spencer and co — god knows Hit Points has said plenty over the years — but they were at least right on this one, and it’s a lesson Sony might have paid more attention to. If you can’t justify making this thing without pricing it at £700, you probably shouldn’t be making it. 

But that’s Sony these days, isn’t it. If there’s a contrast to be drawn between the interlocking fates of Xbox and PlayStation over the last five or six years it’s that Microsoft has made a bunch of big, quite brave bets that haven’t come off, but Sony is just completely out of touch; cranking up prices in a global economic crisis, launching new products at exorbitant costs, closing some of its most beloved studios while pivoting the surviving ones to a style of game that basically no one wants to play. Over the last few weeks Sony has ratcheted up the price of PS5 in Japan, and the fancy-schmancy DualSense Edge controller globally, and no doubt more of the same is in the post. There is always a business justification for this stuff — a weak currency, a component shortage, an inflation hoo-hah — but with every new announcement and pricing tweak Sony reminds us that it values its own corporate interests far more than those of its customers. It has been increasingly apparent for a while, but now we can say it without the slightest shred of doubt: the hubris of the PS3 era has returned. We probably shouldn’t let it stand.

The thing is, we probably will. We complained about the $70 price hike for new games, then went out and bought them anyway. We continued to buy PS5s when Sony jacked up the price, and bought PSVR 2 despite it costing 50% more at launch than its predecessor. After the announcement yesterday IGN polled readers on their interest in PS5 Pro, and while the 85% ‘no’ vote has earned the headlines, the beancounters and bossmen at PlayStation HQ will be thinking, 15% of them said yes? At £700? Across an existing userbase of 60 million consoles? Fuckin sick. We can do no wrong! The weird, annoying, sad thing is, they’re absolutely right.

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