As of writing this blog post, September of 2024, Sony has recently announced their upgrade to the original PlayStation 5, the PlayStation 5 Pro.
The announcement was met with less than enthusiastic responses, primarily because of the announced launch prices, which most people don't see as being in any way justified by the less-than-impressive hardware improvements and lack of a disc drive. (The announcement did not mention a version of the console with one at all.)
The announced launch price of the console was US$700 / £700 / €800.
Contrast this with the launch price of the original disc-driveless PS5, US$399 / £359 / €399.
The jump in price is very significant, while the announced improvements in hardware are very moderate at best, with an announced 45% increased GPU performance, and almost no performance improvement in CPU nor RAM speed. Sony's presentation claimed an improvement of about 100% in hardware raytracing performance (ie. about double), but this is less than impressive taking into account the fact that the number of PS5 games supporting raytracing is abysmal (and even in most of those the visual improvements are not very notable.)
I am making the prediction here, in September of 2024, that the PS5 Pro will sell relatively poorly. Not abysmally poorly, but still quite significantly so (unless Sony changes something drastically to improve the situation.)
The original PS5 has sold approximately 60 million units as of writing this post.
I predict that, if the console is sold as it was announced, for its announced launch price, and Sony doesn't do anything to significantly improve the situation, the PS5 Pro will sell about one tenth of that, ie. less than 10 million units. Perhaps even significantly less (5 million or less.)
Existing PS5 users have little incentive to upgrade. Some definitely will (because there are always so-called "whales" who want the latest and best, and don't care about price), but only a small fraction.
People who will be buying the PS5 for the first time will have two choices, one costing almost double that of the other, and either via research or word-of-mouth they will probably know that the more expensive version does not really provide improvements significant enough to pay double the price, so they are likely to choose the cheaper option.
So, in summary, my prediction is that the PS5 Pro will sell about 5-10 million units in total, if sold as announced and Sony doesn't change things significantly. This compared to the 60 million base PS5 units sold.
