The PS5 Pro needs to take me on a lavish holiday to make seven hundred smackers worth it

£700? $700? How many Uber rides do I need to complete to pay for a PS5 Pro?

You must be joking. / Sony

Seven hundred quid. 700 USD, before tax. Let that sink in. Just start imagining the nice things you could do, the places you could go, with that money. Yes, I love playing video games, but a new console that plays, quite literally, all the same games I already have access to? Yikes.

Yes, I’m talking about the PS5 Pro, hot off of Mark Cerny’s technical presentation. The PS5 Pro will take your existing PS5 games and make them look better than ever, with PSSR AI upscaling, faster ray tracing, better performance – it’s all about making your games look better than ever.

I just took a look and for the price of the PS5 Pro – minus Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc Drive and vertical stand – I could buy a 17” gaming laptop with a 144hz screen, RTX 3050 GPU, and 16GB of RAM. With that little laptop I could play most games reasonably well with adjusted graphics settings. 

It doesn't include a disc drive or vertical stand. / Sony

If you throw in the price of that disc drive (sold separately), then you could go even further and get a laptop with an RTX 4060, giving you access to DLSS 3 frame generation and ray reconstruction. How the PS5 Pro’s PSSR AI upscaling will stack up to DLSS 3’s best-in-class image quality remains to be seen.

Keep in mind, a modern laptop is an all-in-one gaming machine, no need to plug in a TV and buy a controller (which recently saw a price increase). But if you’re not a PC gamer, I understand – why worry about tech specs you could go on holiday?

Spot the difference. / Sony

From my local airport I can jump on a plane and enjoy two full weeks in a European destination like Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, or even further like Morocco, all-inclusive, for less than £700. If you actually look for a destination you’ve always been interested in and do some bargain hunting, you could probably go somewhere that might genuinely change your life. 

These are just a few of the luxuries that you can afford with £700 or more burning a hole in your wallet, but the fact is that we’re in a cost-of-living crisis. Inflation has raised prices on household essentials, wages aren’t increasing in step, and video games aren’t at the top of anyone’s shopping list. It feels almost cruel, in a climate like this, to try and convince people that the PS5 Pro, with its meager enhancements, is actually worth the money. 

This might be the biggest rip off in modern gaming. / Sony

I haven’t played Astro Bot yet, and our review says it’s great. But that’s one of the only games on PS5 that makes the console feel special, the last ones being Astro’s Playroom and Demon’s Souls, both from launch. Yes, I do really want to make a “PS5 has no games” joke here, but the point that meme tries to make is that you can play these games elsewhere, and they’ll often look and perform better. If that’s what you care about, then the PS5 Pro isn’t actually changing anything in that regard.

If money isn’t an object for you, get a PC. If money is an object for you, the Xbox Series S or Nintendo Switch are great consoles with fantastic games available. The only real reason to invest in PS5 Pro is if you really want to stay invested in the top-end Sony ecosystem, and if that’s you… good luck.