Here’s how we ended up in a world where the PS5 Pro costs £700

Welcome to the alternate timeline we appear to find ourselves in now, slightly adjacent to – but definitely distinct from – regular old reality. Where Hyundai approves a concept for production that looks like Dr. Emmett Brown’s weekend project. Where F1 races finish without the Dutch national anthem being played, and where a games console is going on sale for the bargain price of £700. 

Since the very first labcoats started slapping together gaming hardware into boxes that would sit under our tellies, the purpose of a ‘games console’ was to offer an affordable alternative to arcade units or home computers. It was all the stuff you needed to play games, with none of the extra bits that drove up the price or meant you could also use it to do your homework. Everybody won.

That is, until September 2024, when Sony’s latest console announcement dropped, and seemed to go against the spirit of the whole arrangement. The PS5 Pro offers the best graphics PlayStation’s ever delivered, a more powerful GPU than the existing PS5, and it can do ray-traced lighting for more convincing virtual environments. Thing is, £700 is quite a lot of money for all that.  

Is it all about inflation?

Well, this is 2024, after all. The age of paying for your next bottle of olive oil with Klarna and beginning each day with a prayer to Martin Lewis to find the strength not to hit the boost button on the central heating. The effects of the coronavirus pandemic are still being felt in profound ways across the global economy, and this bit of tear-jerking console pricing is just one of the ripples. 

If you look at the dollar pricing, this isn’t the priciest PlayStation console Sony’s brought to market when you adjust them all for inflation. As Linus Tech Tips points out, the PS3’s $599 (£425) launch price in 2006 works out as $778 in 2024 money. 

That’s about £583, also known as “considerably less than the PS5 actually costs here” so we need to factor other not-at-all-depressing elements in too, like the effects of Brexit on our trade position and the strength of the pound against the dollar. Wheee, gaming! Great laugh, isn’t it. 

Apparently it’s not much of a laugh for console makers at the moment, either?

Correct. The business model always used to work like this: sell the console units at a small loss, then make up the profits in the long-term with software sales for the platform. But that’s not holding true today. Live service games, free-to-play models and subscriptions like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus all make the hardware loss model a bit murkier. 

Sony and Microsoft are both posting profits in their PlayStation and Xbox divisions, but getting massive revenue back from games just isn’t the sure thing it once was. That means they’re both probably more inclined to try and get those profits when you buy the platform now, rather than four years down the line when you buy the £80 collector’s edition of Shoot The Cool Gun: Remastered. 

Can’t we just blame it on AI, like everything else?

Great idea. And actually, there’s some basis for pinning this one on that meddling ChatGPT and its constant stream of helpful summaries. 

The rush to invest in AI hardware among the tech industry has driven up silicon costs across the board, which means when you’re speccing out a console that features “a GPU that has 67 per cent more Compute Units than the current PS5”, the manufacturing cost is higher than it would have been just a few years ago.

Previous PlayStation Pro models didn’t have to face that, and that’s how they were able to trot along into your shopping basket for only a small premium over the base console a few years later, but still gave you some noticeably prettier pixels once you got home and hooked it up. 

Seems like gamers are getting used to paying more for everything lately.

And that brings us neatly to our last point – you’re good at this. A cynic might argue that there’s a touch of strategic price adjustment going on here because gamers have become accustomed to paying more for things that used to be far more affordable. 

When PS5 released, the semiconductor shortage caused by covid lockdowns meant that units were really tricky to find in shops. That created a booming used market for the consoles, where prices soared way beyond the retail price. 

Even before that, Bitcoin’s shock surge in value prompted the crypto bros to go out and buy up all the powerful gaming graphics cards to use in their crypto mining farms. The resulting scarcity also caused a price gouge-tastic used market for GPUs, which Nvidia seemed to take notice of, because when they released their new flagship graphics card in 2020, the RTX 3090, they priced it at £1,500, a huge increase on what the equivalent model had cost in previous generations. 

Any reasons to be cheerful?

By all accounts, the games do look rather nice on PS5 Pro. Well, you did ask for any reasons.