The $700 PS5 Pro To Nowhere

Where does PlayStation go from here and how long before Phil Spencer leaves Xbox?

Sep 14, 2024

That was a bizarre PS5 Pro presentation from Mark Cerny. Nine minutes and 40 seconds, the first third of which was spent talking about the old hardware, the rest of it focused exclusively on showing older games running slightly better, and looking a little bit prettier, on a machine that will cost twice as much as a used PS5. The YouTube video has over 193,000 downvotes. It all had the vibe of "we were promised flying cars but all we got were sharper textures in Spider-Man 2 performance mode."

I think the surprisingly vocal backlash to the PS5 Pro reveal speaks in part to a general angst right now about where high-end console gaming is headed. Sony has yet to show off any new first-party franchises or innovative sequels that set the PS5 apart from the generation that preceded it except Astro Bot, a GOTY frontrunner that was nowhere to be found in the PS5 Pro presentation. Horizon Forbidden West, God of War: Ragnarok, and Spider-Man 2 were bigger and more beautiful than their predecessors but still fundamentally the same games.

Four years in, it still doesn't feel like the PS5 has had a The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild moment. The most exciting and novel gaming experiences, many from indie developers, now predominantly originate on PC, and the most exciting hardware innovations are in handhelds, with the most hype for a Switch 2 that won't even be half as powerful as the PS5 Pro. Sony remains the dominant player in gaming, but it feels like the real party is happening somewhere else.

A less big brain theory of why the PS5 Pro reveal went down like a lead weight is that it tried to carve out a niche no one is interested in. Vergecast producer Liam James suggested Sony's real mistake was not making the PS5 Pro $1,000, and making it feel like a real top-of-the-line PC gaming experience for people who play on consoles rather than this weird in-between device that that's too pricey for an upgrade but not impressive enough for those with money to spend.

Sony got away with this last time with the PS4 Pro because tech was cheaper and the jump to 4K was more noticeable. Paying a premium to get a slightly higher fidelity at 60fps just isn't the same proposition. It's actually just kind of a bummer. The PS5 is great, has an incredible library of games, and all of them will look even better on PS5 Pro, and the main result won't be selling more consoles to more people but charging the same people more money to enjoy them.

Phil Spencer's final days at Xbox

The Microsoft gaming CEO joined the Windows maker as an intern in 1988. He started working on Xbox in 2001. Over two decades later, he's in charge of the whole division and seems to have no ideas left about what to do with it. Under Spencer, Xbox drove innovation on gaming accessibility, backwards compatibility, closed the gap between console and PC with play anywhere, championed cross-play, launched a subscription service, a cloud gaming initiative, and capped off an Xbox studios acquisition spree with the largest merger in gaming history. And what does the platform have to show for it?

This week, Microsoft announced another 650 layoffs across Xbox and Activision Blizzard. In addition to the 1,900 earlier in the year, the total cuts account for almost 20 percent of the publisher's total headcount at the time it was acquired. Spencer wrote in a memo that most of those laid off were in support and admin roles, insinuating this was part of the normal flow of post-merger streamlining, but those posting jobless notices on LinkedIn after the fact ranged from artists on Call of Duty support teams to engineers for last year's mobile spin-off Warcraft Rumble.

"For the past year, our goal has been to minimize disruption while welcoming new teams and enabling them to do their best work," Spencer wrote in the opening of his email telling hundreds of people they were fired. "Throughout our team’s history, we have had great moments, and we have had challenging ones," he continued. "Today is one of the challenging days." That was the extent of his attempts to contextualize the cuts in some larger story about Xbox and its future.

Maybe that's because he doesn't know what that future looks like, or it's one that won't include him. Ten years is a long time to lead a platform. Spencer's counterparts at Nintendo and Sony have all been replaced or moved on during that time. The longtime company man has always been good about sharing his enthusiasm for games and Xbox, a passion grounded in his public user profile that always shows him playing tons of different games. But lately he's seemed much more subdued.

It began in May 2023 following the disastrous launch of Redfall, the first Xbox exclusive to come out of Microsoft's 2021 acquisition of Bethesda. Spencer went on the Kinda Funny podcast and, appearing solemn and apologetic, basically said Xbox would never be the leading gaming platform again. It was an odd message for an exec to deliver to millions of its most loyal fans, especially in the midst of a regulatory fight to buy the biggest gaming publisher in the country.

In more recent interviews Spencer has talked about the pressures of capitalism, the need to run a business, and lots of other economic constraints that sound less like a leader rallying the base than someone who is actually no longer in control of it. One way to read this is that the pity party is just a way to deflect tough questions about brutal cuts across the gaming division, including at Tango Gameworks, maker of the one Xbox exclusive of the past decade that people unabashedly loved.

I think that it's more genuine than that though. Read the leaked internal email from when the PS5 was announced. Spencer sounds excited and confident that the Xbox Series X/S, with the wind at its back from all of his other gaming initiatives, will be back in contention this console generation. Instead, sales are tracking behind even the Xbox One as its exclusives slowly begin getting ported to other platforms. Game Pass is getting worse. And cloud gaming is still a side-show.

“We've got a goal of being able to deliver a game, roughly, every three to four months,” Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty said in 2019. And 2021. And the summer of 2023. And the fall of 2023. The company has indeed managed to release at least four notable first-party games every year, but just barely, despite the dramatic increase in its first-party portfolio, and the results are still very “lumpy” to use Booty’s phrase.

Senua's Saga: Hellblade II is the only one for the first 10 months of 2024, with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Flight Simulator 2024, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle all crammed into the final quarter (and without spending $69 billion on Activision Blizzard the company would have still been one game short). And nothing in the pipeline looks like it will transform Xbox’s fortunes. It feels like the only thing that might be able to do that is an Xbox handheld that bridges the gap between the breadth of PC gaming and the convenience of consoles. Will that be Spencer’s parting gift to platform?

Patch notes

Visions of Mana update 1.03 fixes the duration of the snowman effect that was wrecking players. "This brings improvements to overall game stability, bug fixes, and adjusts the mechanic to dispel the frozen status effect on allies."
Elden Ring update 1.14 buffed a Brass Shield that players already thought was one of the best in the game. "Dude I wasn't expecting them to make it even more ridiculous lmfao it now has a 75 guard boost at +25 which is higher then some greatshields," wrote Reddit user N_audio. "Amazing."
Star Wars Outlaws title update 1.1.2 tweaked early stealth sections to make them less annoying and also made players less likely to be detected while rolling. Even better: "Many additional idle animations for NPC have been added across all planets."
Spectre Divide's new patch makes the grind more generous, doubling most XP rewards. "To our surprise, Weekly/Daily Contracts and Crew Score Progression have been slower than intended, so we’ve increased the amount of XP and Fame from Daily and Weekly contracts."
Deadlock's latest update refined the minimap and players hate it. "Neutral Camps are now represented by a highlight glow on the buildings they are located within," reads one of the changes. The new minimap is more elegant but shows much less details and information and players want the old one back.

What people are saying

"I see it as a price change rather than a price increase." — PlayStation co-CEO Hideaki Nishino

"[Gaming] still where the action is, and it's like the pandemic but now you're going to have to take a few…figure out how to get through it, drive an Uber or whatever, go off to find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year." – Ex-Sony executive Chris Deering

“When you think about it from a business perspective, making [Palworld] a live-service game would extend its lifespan and make it more stable in terms of profitability.” – Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe

"Palworld was never designed with that model in mind, and it would require too much work to adapt the game at this point…We apologize for any concern this may have caused, and we hope this clarifies our position." – also Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe

"Everybody pays too much attention to and cares too much about Metacritic scores. It's gotten to the point where there's almost a set formula – if you want to get a high Metacritic score, this is how you make the game," – No More Heroes creator Goichi 'Suda51' Suda

“Animal Well is the kind of game that doesn’t really communicate very well why it’s special. It’s a game about secrets and holding back information, and I think that’s what makes it interesting to play, but it’s hard to market a game like that – I can’t just show the best parts.” – Solo designer Bill Basso

Three games to play this weekend

Caravan SandWitch

Wild Bastards

I Am Your Beast