PS5 Pro signposts a disc-less future that few actually want | Opinion

Sony’s PS5 Pro is the only major hardware launch we’re getting this year – making 2024 into a bit of a damp squib when you consider that it was originally expected to bring a similar spec-bumped revision of the Xbox Series X and perhaps even the launch of Nintendo’s Switch successor.

It’s rather telling that Nintendo letting the merest morsel of information about that upcoming device fall from the table – the entirely unsurprising news that it will be backwards-compatible with the Switch – has largely overshadowed the launch of the PS5 Pro.

Sony has found a particular niche for its Pro consoles; they’re a way to double-dip into hardcore enthusiasts’ wallets midway through the cycle, and they may also serve a useful role in convincing holdouts on older hardware to finally upgrade. PS5 Pro’s very high price tag means it’ll probably do better in the former role than the latter, but either way, the market share it will ultimately pick up will be much like the PS4 Pro’s – respectable enough, but hardly exciting.

Discussion of the precise benefits of the Pro console are in the realm of Digital Foundry, not mere mortals like myself whose eyes cross when trying to count pixels, and your interpretation of the value of those benefits and whether they justify the mid-cycle upgrade cost is an incredibly subjective judgement.

What I’d argue is actually more interesting about PS5 Pro in a wider perspective isn’t what Sony has done to the chips in the system – it’s what they’ve chosen not to include, and what it tells us about the decision-making process that’s likely occurring for the company’s future hardware.

PS5 Pro doesn’t have a disc drive. Anyone who wants to play disc-based games on the system will need to buy one of the add-on drives Sony started selling when the PS5 Slim model was released, adding further to the cost of the already very expensive device.

To add insult to injury, Sony doesn’t seem to have made any effort whatsoever to ensure that those drives are actually well-stocked for the launch of the Pro. I can only speak directly to the situation in Japan, where they’ve been out of stock at most major retailers for months and even second-hand units are being sold at three to four times SRP by scalpers. But asking around suggests that the situation isn’t much better in other regions. That’s a very rough welcome to PS5 Pro ownership for anyone upgrading who has a collection of games on disc.

It’s possible, of course, that Sony excluded the drive simply because its cost would push the Pro’s price tag even higher. However, the incongruity of Sony’s “Pro” console lacking the basic ability to play the games Sony sells at retailers all around the world is striking, and it’s difficult to see the decision to accept that incongruity – and the inconvenience it would inevitably cause for customers – as anything other than strategic.

Digital sales make up a bigger and bigger portion of the industry’s revenues every year, but physical game sales are still a very big deal – and physical games are products that fall outside the control of publishers and platform holders in a way that they have found increasingly irritating in recent years.

People who buy physical games can sell them second-hand or lend them to their friends, retailers with physical games in stock can discount them or include them in bundles as they see fit… All of which is anathema to the executive minds that created our modern dystopia where consumers never actually own anything they buy.

Only a decade ago, Sony made a very big deal of its commitment to the simplicity of physical media ownership, and basically won an entire console generation with a short video of Shuhei Yoshida handing a game to Adam Boyes. Now, the company has launched its top-end console without the ability to play physical media.

The writing seems to be on the wall; if playing games from a disc is being labelled a non-“Pro” behaviour in this generation, it seems very likely that the next generation will attempt to drop discs entirely.

That’s a decision that would be far more popular in the boardroom than it would in the living rooms of the company’s actual consumers. For all that consumers have embraced digital games – the revenue figures prove that – it’s striking that they seem very ambivalent about digital-only consoles.

The PS5’s disc-less model was dramatically less popular than the disc-enabled one in every territory we have data for. Consumers are reasonably sophisticated on this issue; they like the convenience of digital games, but seem very nonplussed at the idea of having the option of physical media taken away from them.

Figuring out just how strong the resistance to such a move would be is probably a major preoccupation for some people at Sony right now. If so, PS5 Pro is a pretty interesting test case, and right now feels like a botched job on this front – it’s frankly extremely damaging to the PlayStation brand that everyone who buys one of these new consoles and wants to play physical media is being driven into the arms of scalpers to try to get their hands on a disc drive.

The writing seems to be on the wall; if playing games from a disc is being labelled a non-“Pro” behaviour in this generation, it seems very likely that the next generation will attempt to drop discs entirely

I should clarify that I don’t think there’s any conspiracy behind the lack of availability of the drives – Sony isn’t trying to push people away from buying a drive by constraining supply, they’ve just been extremely poor at managing supply chains for peripherals and other devices in recent years, with other products like the PlayStation Portal and DualSense Edge controller also facing similar issues. For all that Sony remains very, very good at designing hardware, somewhere along the way it completely lost its once-legendary competence at managing supply chains and keeping retail channels stocked.

That group of consumers who want to play physical media is no small fraction, by the way. It’s bound to be almost everyone buying one of these consoles – the Venn diagram of people willing to spend this much money on a fairly modest mid-cycle spec bump, and people whose passion for this medium is exhibited in part by their impressively large shelf of physical games, is probably more or less an entirely overlapping circle. This was very much the wrong part of the audience to start this experiment of digital-only consoles on.

Physical media, for all that it’s an annoyance to publishers and platform holders, is still a pillar of this business. It remains especially important to older generations of consumers – who are the most likely to be able to actually afford the industry’s increasingly expensive products.

There’s a solid reason why Nintendo remains so closely wedded to physical media – the announcement that its Switch successor will be backwards compatible essentially confirms that it will continue to launch cartridge games for that console.

For its part, Sony seems keen to move on to an all-digital future, with the otherwise baffling decision-making on PS5 Pro being a clear sign in that direction – but the company may have grossly underestimated the strength of public affection for the option of physical media, and the value that the availability of that media creates for the console ecosystem as a whole.

Perhaps the feedback to the Pro will give it pause as it finalises decisions on whether the PS6 should continue this grand experiment.