Sony’s unveiling of the PS5 Pro should have been a moment of triumph for the company and its fans alike. Instead, the whole gaming world can’t stop talking about how stupidly overpriced the $700 console is. Overpriced products tend to make other products look great in comparison, so here are some appetizing alternatives.
1) PS5 with full set of accessories
Let’s start with the obvious. The PS5 Pro’s price isn’t simply outrageous compared to other products, it’s outrageous when put next to Sony’s own lineup. For the $700 you must cough up for the Pro, you can get a base PlayStation 5 with a disc drive, buy a vertical stand to place it on (so it doesn’t look like it drank one too many beers and decided to take a nap on the sidewalk), buy an extra DualSense controller, and a charging station for your new set of controllers.
After all that, you’ll still have enough money left to buy the latest AAA game on day one. We can stop here and the PS5 Pro’s pricing would still look frankly embarrassing, but the non-Sony alternatives somehow make it even worse.
2) Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck
Let’s get even crazier. What if we told you you can get not one, but two rival consoles from this generation for the price of a single PS5 Pro? You can grab a Nintendo Switch OLED model and a 512 GB LCD Steam Deck for a combined $700, thanks to a massive sale of the latter courtesy of Valve.
You can still buy both consoles for around the same price without the need for a sale, but you will have to settle for a non-OLED Switch and a Steam Deck with less storage. Either way, that two current-gen consoles, which will give you access to almost any game you can think of, are comparable in price to one single PS5 Pro explains exactly why this is the main talking point with Sony’s new release, and why this article exists in the first place.
3) High-end gaming GPU
Sony almost seems to have forgotten a large part of the appeal of consoles is their lower price compared to PC. If the latter stops being much more expensive, very little would keep people from moving to the more powerful and multifunctional platform. Now, we’re not saying you can build a high-end gaming PC for $700, but you can buy the Radeon 7900 XT, AMD’s second most powerful GPU currently on the market, for that money.
The graphics card is far and away the most expensive part in a typical gaming PC, so you’ll be halfway there to building that dream desktop setup that’ll comfortably carry you to the next console generation. The important part of this equation is once you’ve built a PC, most of its parts won’t need replacing for many years. If Sony’s pricing schemes extend into the next generation, you may very well be able to upgrade to another top tier GPU for the price of a PS6 and keep gaming on Ultra settings with high FPS while other folks are scraping to buy a stand for their uber expensive console.
4) Three years of Ultimate Game Pass
As a prospective PlayStation customer, you probably didn’t expect to hear the words Game Pass come up, but here they are. You can have Ultimate Game Pass for three whole years, which is the expected time-frame for the launch of the next console generation, for $720. Alternatively, since we already tried to lure you over to PC, you can pay for PC Game Pass for five years with the same money. Mind you, all of this is after Microsoft raised the prices for Game Pass across the board.
Granted, Microsoft can always do that again in the future and distort this favorable math, but right now, if you have any device you can use Game Pass on, several years of free games and many other perks seem like a better investment than the PS5 Pro.
5) 120 Big Macs
Let’s get serious for a moment. There’s one way to determine the PS5 Pro’s true worth and that’s via the Big Mac Index. This is a totally legitimate economic measurement, by the way, and according to the current rates, you can get approximately 120 Big Macs for the price of a single PS5 Pro. One hundred and twenty hamburgers vs. a single console—the numbers don’t lie; this one’s a lopsided victory for Ronald McDonald.
No one can tell you what to do with your hard-earned money, and we’re not trying to. It’s simply an effective exercise to put things into perspective now and again.
We’re afraid these comparisons aren’t too favorable for the PS5 Pro, especially when the Big Mac entered the picture, but it didn’t need to be this way—all Sony had to do was not bloat the price to the Moon, but they did, so here we are, buying Big Macs.
