The high price ($699) of the PS5 Pro is still a hot debate in the industry. Although many fans are still disappointed with the price, analysts and even game developers have publicly stated that it makes sense given the market and the hardware content.
As for Sony itself, the company recently addressed the pricing issue (and the decision to keep the disc drive as a separate purchase) in an interview with IGN.
PlayStation senior product manager Toshi Aoki said:
Well, the technologies that I just mentioned that we are introducing to give players new experiences, and not only the technological differences, but also SSD, Wi-Fi 7 and new technologies that surround the game. So it’s more of a complete package that gives great value to players … the most active players we’re targeting.
With PS5 Pro we offer all these new technical innovations and we have added two terabyte SSD as well as Wi-Fi 7. We think that’s the complete package it offers to most players. As for the disc, this is an option for players. Not all players have discs, although most players probably do… but we have an option to add this for those players. So I think it’s more of a balance of the value proposition that we provide.
Interestingly, Aoki also confirmed that Sony was working on the PS5 Pro even before the launch of the basic console in November 2020.
We started talking about this before the PS5 even came out… because the PS5 specs were already locked in. We were ready to launch and everything. We knew, of course, as you said, that technology improves every year.
The PlayStation 5 Pro will launch on November 7 for $699 / £699 / €799, with 67% more computing units than the base PS5, as well as device-based DLSS anti-aliasing reconstruction technology to the called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) . In addition, its ray tracing capabilities are significantly better than the enhanced ray tracing technology borrowed from AMD graphics cards that was not released after Sony’s push.
