PS5 Pro Price Is $699/£699 - The Digital Foundry Take

we've got a talk price it came up at the end went down like a cuper cold sick 700 700 UK p8 800 e uh 120,000 Yen um vertical stand sold separately don't worry I'm sorted assuming it's the same vertical stand as the one for the slim but I suspect it is because ecos system um let's take some supporter comments here uh tagen 86 why do we see such a large price gap between EU and us this time it's uh €799 here which is exactly twice what I paid for my PS4 Pro back in the day 399 Mackie D says that in Brackets frankly mental price is obviously the immediate talking point as that's a whole lot of money for a mid gem bump it's for most it's for the most enthusiastic of enthusiasts the wealthy and very few others but given the lack of price Cuts this gen anyway are we looking at big price hikes for the genuine next generation of consoles maybe not 800 quid but certainly 600 plus seems on the cards um Mr Birds um one of my world models in terms of management style says so I so I guess son looked at PlayStation 5 selling for 700 plus for over two years on eBay and figured they could make that official I've been on record for expecting a high price Mr Birds has been on the [Laughter] record but €799 without a disc five wasn't even on my card but is that just a market reality I'm actually inclined to think they will find an audience for it given the first two years of PlayStation 5 I think one of the sort of mitigating factors for that first two years is that we were essentially locked up in our own homes um and needed things to do and were willing to pay pay extreme prices to do those things um so I'm not sure we can sort of look at that as a as a sort of indicator I do think however that um well consumer electronics are going up in price generally umon phones are you know thousand Flagship phones a th dollars upwards typically they probably will find an audience for this the question is whether they can actually justify it what's the difference between a PS5 Pro and a PS5 there's going to be a bit of extra memory in there I'd assume the cooling has to be better um and the key price is going to you the key increase is obviously going to be the size of the chip um but it you know all the evidence is pointing to an existing relatively cheap process node now so you know I have to admit I was expecting um 599 with a haircut to the price of the base unit doesn't look as though that's happening um John I'm gonna go to you first on this one it's it's kind of Staggering isn't it yeah no we're in a weird age because I think there is this man you look at consoles the history of consoles and I think people generally expect them that's going to sit within a fairly narrow price window we actually saw that creep up a bit during the uh the HD era you know before that things were typically 300 or less and then obviously you know there was the PS3 situation with 599 but that came down pretty quick and then we right I was just thinking actually Cas Here I Am the $599 debacle oh yeah and here we are we are blew the doors off that absolutely but but at the same time like you said like Electronics in general are like becoming extremely expensive like think about when the iPhone was first around and people were buling at the price but now it's like oh you want the pro model with just like the lower storage it's like 1,500 bucks right Flagship from other companies same price range people upgrade these things every year GPU prices look where they look where they're at compared to where they used to be like the days of the 1080 are long gone and even that you know that was good enough for the time but even that felt expensive You could argue uh but now like GPU prices are like way higher like everything is much higher and based on what Microsoft told us back when we saw the series X and Series S reveal it's like just the cost of things at this point like it it all makes sense why the price is so high it's just that in this space that's traditionally stayed within sort sort of a price ceiling and every time they've tried to push out of that ceiling it's been met with negativity right uh it seems more shocking than in other product categories and I think that's why the the sticker shock is there but it's I feel like the US price is just like borderline okay somehow but man when you look at that Euro price or the Japanese price it's just like when it's like okay if you want to get a PS5 Pro in Europe with the disc drive uh you're looking at like 920 EUR so that's that's a lot man that is a lot that is that is a huge jump that's this is way way way beyond what we've seen in the console space and I kind of wonder if this is kind of where we're heading in the future like do you foresee A1 thousand Xbox for instance nextg maybe maybe there'll be other options maybe this is just where we're landing and instead of this is like this the opposite of the series S series X where we now have the the base like sort of a baseline but then an upper tier I don't know I I don't know man we're just in a weird spot right now I was just uh reading the some more supporter questions on the patreon Paul Calamar says I hear all these people out here saying the PS5 Pro is expensive $700 but Chad Warden wipes his ass with $700 are all these people broke or it's the PS5 Pro pushing the limits of what's acceptable for console pricing it's pushing the limits for sure and I'm going to be really interested to see I mean every every time somebody predicts Doom for a new piece of consumer electronics they kind of forget that they're initially available in limited quantities and always sell out uh so I'm I'm I'm fully aware at this point that I think that the PS5 Pro is is going to sell out Simply you know because there'll be limited numbers on launch but it's certainly going to be um a test I think and um yeah that's that's fascinating it's uh it's it's it's not great though I think that $600 would have been a lot more palatable I think for $700 I'm disappointed at the quality of the presentation I think they could have done a whole lot more MH uh with that man that that's that's kind of crazy um yeah but you know we are seeing things like more expensive gpus I guess my question is this kind of pricing if it does move on to like ps6 I can't surely not but um because you know the whole point of a console is a cheap subsidized mainstream box I don't think there's any level of Subs going into the PS5 pro at this price point no if they're breaking even with a with a five at $500 I don't see $200 of additional costs in the Pro I think it's there's probably you know making some money on that even at the same time you know we have seen that you know as we just pointed out GPU prices have gone up I just wonder at this point whether it's just going to push more people towards the PC simply because well you know you aren't paying the the monthly subscription fee you don't need to pay that at all if you want free games you get them from epic you know Cloud saves everything is there on Steam and actually produced in a in a better form than I'd say any of the consoles so I am concerned that this is actually going to push people towards console uh towards PCS or towards just the regular PS5 or they'll wait for the switch 2 well you know there's a lot of people suggesting that the switch 2 is going to be like $500 which would been I mean you know getting a decent gaming PC ain't cheap either right so well yeah I mean I have seen some bargain fors with uh pre-built systems with an i5 and a 4060 for like 500 which you know I'd say that's actually really really good value it is but you know you know the kind of extra work it takes to get great performance out of that kind of machine right yeah for the 4060 yeah but 4060 yeah I just feel like yeah coming to that value proposition thing I don't the thing I think this is just kind of like the like the second level MacBook you know like this is this is like like when you get they give you this choice and the people who really love PlayStation are going to buy this that's why rich is saying it's going to sell sell out it will like the people who love PlayStation really I think they're just going to buy it but um but you know like when you think about like that utility of price I do think it is entering a different category of consumer electronic at that price level especially with the EU price level yes you will probably never beat a console currently with the manufacturing stuff going on uh at its price point for raw performance in a game uh but then you when you enter this price class category then you think well what if I instead invest the price I would have put into the disc drive into a PC you know and then you start getting into a different I mean a, EUR PC is actually pretty awesome no I I agree you know what I mean so PC is still a different thing in terms of like it still sucks in the living room it is but it's not it's not that's going to get addressed isn't it sooner that's that's what we've been talking about right and hopefully that is exactly what happens I mean if Microsoft doesn't do it valve are going to do it I mean the work's essentially done really the steam yeah translate perfectly to a to a desktop machine mostly mostly yeah but I don't think anybody really wants to create that desktop machine they just want to make PCS work and you just roll your own or let Aus uh or your friendly neighborhood PC Builder make one instead I think that's probably the way forward in that regard it's going to require a lot of work from um PlayStation to to keep that audience if the price is just going to continually go up I mean I suspect that 10th cons no problem at all they they'll somehow they'll make it happen um but 11th gen and Beyond I'm I'm really interested to see how they're going to be able to pull that off