The $700 PS5 Pro doesn’t come with a disc drive
The $700 PS5 Pro doesn’t come with a disc drive
The disc drive is an additional $79.99 purchase.
At $700 you could build a pretty decent PC that would last a lot longer (3060 12gb, Ryzen 5 5600, 16gb of DDR4), and build a steam library that you'll have 20 years from now. I've had the same monitor, keyboard and mouse for an easy 10; controllers don't last that long. They're reaching a point where there's less and less of an actual argument for owning one.
Unfortunately, physical media for gaming died when always-online DRM was normalized. It doesn't matter if you have a game on a disc when you have to phone home every time to use it. The corporation may still block your access.
One more step in ensuring no one owns anything. Lease or rent are your options.
Nintendo is going to continue to eat everybody's lunch with decisions like this one
Sony's problems are twofold:
- They are charging an absurd amount of money for a game console
- They are selling a game console that has practically no first party games for it.
If they had plenty of the latter, they could weather this. But there are still games releasing for the PS4, and they have had 1, maybe 2 PS5 releases that would qualify as first party this year (that don't bubble down to PC).
Jesus christ, Nintendo is gonna win it all aren't they?
Paystation
All good points in the comments, but something I haven't seen a anyone talk about yet:
WHY is a DISK DRIVE $80??? All it does is read a disk. Any encryption on the disk would be decrypted on the console. External disk drives are like $20. If you specially brand them maybe you could go up to $40.
But $80? That's like a Gameboy Advance. That's a miyoo mini plus. That's an entire console in itself.
Why can't you just plug in a random-ass USB 4KBR-disc drive?
Or sell one that we can use to bring in games from PS1, 2, 3, 4 and 5? And state that the drive will be able to be used going forward, into the next gen and beyond.
They've got a rich gaming history at this point and they don't care because they'd rather sell you an $80 digital copy that they can take away at any time and you can't trade it in or really own it. And it's the same with PC games as well, courtesy of Valve and then everyone else.
If the future is digital, we need laws that allow us to transfer ownership of digital content. It would have to be secure, obviously. Not just "steal somebody's console and trade all their games in".
Like it or not the majority of game purchases are digital these days. It's a sad development for sure. I buy all my console games as physical discs myself.
Permanently Deleted
I see lots of people in this thread saying to go to the PC or the Steam Deck, but are we ignoring that both systems do not have a disc drive too?
I mean, aside from the disgusting price of the PS5 Pro not having a disc drive is the biggest offender (and the reason why I am not even considering buying it, despite being a Sony user since the 1st unit).
So I can't play half the games I have, and the other half doesn't need the extra console power. Yay. WOrtH iT.
I’m genuinely curious to how those things are going to sell. My knee jerk reaction is ‘oh hell no’ but there’s a lotta console players out there that want the power but just don’t want to get into PC gaming. Of course there seems to be a lot of people still playing on last gen consoles too so I have no idea where that’s going.
Sony has been on a roll with the boneheaded products nobody wants.
They talked about doing it this way at launch, which they should have. The drive is available as a peripheral, at the cost difference (actually cheaper) of the digital vs disc console. It simplifies manufacturing and distribution, which helps get more consoles on shelves. Now when it doesn't matter as much, they implement it. Go figure.
As far as killing off physical media, yes it pushes further that way, but honestly the game industry has been not favorable to retail stores for some time. This is the least of the offenses.
Hey Sony, I love you but you trolling?
I think they've lost touch with their user base, but I also think they know that there's some people that are just going to buy the console because they don't have a better option available.
Like don't get me wrong yes it's now the same price as a low end gaming computer and it doesn't have upgrade capability, and doesn't have a physical media drive, but you can put it right where your TV is, so no seperate setup so it takes up less space (PC games on a tv instead of a monitor looks weird and can be a pain to fix). Plus it's easier to use/more user friendly and everything is in one place.
I personally will not be upgrading past my current, as I find this generation to be super lack luster and not cost effective, but I can see why some might, I disagree with it but I see it.
Yup, not even slightly surprising, I do believe we have saw the last disk in a game console bit of a pity they are doing it in a refresh but you could tell from the bolted on disk drive that the only reason they added one at all is they would have lost alot of people who don’t have internet. The modern world will soon be completely inaccessible without internet.
Uhhh. Maybe I'm a little TOO far from the console crowd but I'm going to say this anyways.
Who tf cares? I'm a PC gamer and I've been without a disk drive since 2009.
I will happily admit it is definitely a different situation. For one, this would essentially give Sony a monopoly on games. Which would mean that they would never lower prices and gamers have no one to go to other than them. You know what I'm talking about, all the same shit that Nintendo has been doing for years.
I guess that I'm just curious how many people dislike this.
Price Has No Limits™
PayStation ∆◯╳☐
It was pretty much a given that this would happen, since there were already options with and without disc drives.
And obviously sooner or later gaming will probably move to an entirely online service like streaming.
It's just a matter of time until the internet and worldwide coverage is ready for it. I always imagined that in a distant future we'd basically only buy a controller, that connects to an app that'll let you stream. And every game will be in a subscription service like a Netflix.
Completely different strategy: the PS4 generation has produced a lot of games, sony could have stopped trying to compete with the high end PC market and gone in the Nintendo direction. Gives us new ways to access their library, give developers new tools to play with, release a 2nd mid-gen refresh and release a ps4 slim that is equivalent to the ps4 pro, encourage games for new ps4-slim and ps4 pro+. What do you think?
Id open it up and see if a connector is available and use it if so