A few years ago, the console wars were raging hot, with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all battling for their particular part of the market while also contending with the sudden arrival of the viral Steam Deck. In the years since, things haven’t just cooled down; the scene is practically frozen. Sony remains the best seller against Xbox, with about five times the sales, and Microsoft doesn’t seem to care, as they just want people to sign up for their Game Pass service, available on PC as well as Xbox. The Steam Deck has its own dedicated fan base, but rather than becoming a real competitor, it’s firmly a niche product. On the flip side, the Nintendo Switch is almost identical to the way it was when it was introduced seven years ago, but it sells so well that they haven’t bothered to update it beyond adding a higher-tier model with a bigger screen.

Coming up on this holiday season, there are two ways to view this: either there is a real market opening for a competitive, aggressive new console option, or there just isn’t much interest in consoles anymore. Sony seems to agree with both positions, introducing the new, late-generation PlayStation 5 Pro but making it a relatively niche product for PlayStation obsessives. In a more competitive market, they would have made more compromises and released a more mainstream, well-priced product. In its absence, the PlayStation 5 Pro pushes its graphical fidelity as hard as it can for a price of $700.

That’s right: $700 for a PlayStation. The price isn’t as bad as it seems on the surface — if you ignore that they are charging extra for a vertical stand, which is just ridiculous, and don’t include a disc drive. Adjusted for inflation, it’s not Sony’s most expensive console, and computing parts have simply gotten more expensive, particularly given that this uses a new AMD ray-tracing tech that hasn’t been previously released. On paper, the specs are impressive, but they don’t always translate well to the real world.

For example, depending on how you use your PlayStation, you may not notice any difference. If you’ve been playing on the “Performance” fidelity setting connected to a fairly ordinary TV, upgrading to the Pro will be a pointless waste of your money with no meaningful, discernible differences unless you go right up to the screen. On the flip side, if you prefer your games to run at the highest quality on the biggest, highest-resolution screen, the PS5 Pro will be a meaningful improvement — if you look for it. The PS5 Pro will run smoother at those top settings, with higher-resolution textures loading faster and smoother, and you can use their new upscaling AI model to make 8K gaming a real possibility. It also gives you the option for proper ray-tracing without compromising performance, so long as the game supports it.

This final point is the real snag with the Pro: not only do you need the kind of TV setup that will notice the difference, but the game itself has to be optimized for the upgrade. Whether the game you enjoy playing has been optimized is down to the developer.

This launch also highlights Sony’s game exclusivity issue. This is Sony’s most powerful console ever, with new ray-tracing and smart upscaling tech, and you would expect them to showcase how much better their current titles perform on it, while also unveiling new titles made to exploit this new tech. For example, Killzone: Shadow Fall wasn’t a great game and was clearly rushed to meet the PS4 launch, but it was an exclusive title that showed off the best visuals a game could have on that console — and it still looks incredible. By contrast, Sony had no new titles to showcase and demonstrated the benefits of the new console on years-old titles. The newest exclusive Sony titles are Astro Bot — a small Mario Universe knock-off — and Concord, their new multiplayer shooter. Except Concord isn’t included anymore, as its launch was so disastrous that it was pulled from the market within weeks, with all customers getting refunds.

That game was in development for eight years. Sony’s most award-winning titles — the Spider-Man, Last of Us, and God of War games — now have PC ports, and they’re honestly better there.

Should you buy the PlayStation 5 Pro? If you’re asking that question, the answer is absolutely not. Technically, it’s a good product and fairly priced, but in reality, it’s only for the PlayStation fanatics who play many hours a week, have a high-end TV setup, and don’t mind that the superior PlayStation 6 will probably be released in 2027, making this immediately redundant.

Shortly after Sony saw the negative reaction to the PS5 Pro launch, they announced a retro PlayStation collection, with the standard PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro in a cool retro grey colorway inspired by the look of 1990s consoles. If you don’t have a PS5 and are looking to get one for the holidays, skip the Pro and get the cool retro-looking one instead.