Sony officially explains why the PS5 Pro is so much more expensive than the PS5

Sony's showcase of the PlayStation 5 Pro garnered many negative reactions from fans, who were particularly upset about the price hike compared to the base model.

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The announcement of the PS5 Pro elicited a mixed reaction from fans, as many were quick to criticize Sony for charging more for a console that seemingly offered few graphical improvements compared to the base PS5 model.

While Sony did showcase some impressive hardware improvements, such as a significant boost to GPU performance and the inclusion of its own upscaling technology, the resulting gaming improvement was poorly showcased to players due to the older games selected by Sony and the unfortunate reality of video compression via YouTube -- which makes the subtle graphical improvements even more challenging to spot.

These reasons were outlined by PlayStation Senior Principal Product Manager Toshi Aoki in a recent interview with IGN. In it, he admitted Sony has struggled with its announcements being viewed on smaller screens, which makes conveying such graphical improvements through video clips difficult, especially considering the improvements the console is offering are best experienced firsthand due to its interactive nature. These seemingly lackluster graphical improvements caused players to erupt at Sony's $700 asking price for PS5 Pro, which Aoki was asked to justify.

"Well, the technologies that I just mentioned that we are putting in to deliver new experiences for game players, and also not just the technological differences, but the SSD, the Wi-Fi 7, and the new technologies that surround the gameplay as well. So it's more of a full package that will give that exceptional value to the players... the most engaged players that we're targeting.

Well, with the PS5 Pro, we are offering all these new tech innovations, and we added the two terabyte SSD, as well as the Wi-Fi 7. We believe as a full package that it offers for the most players," said Aoki

Aoki pointed to all of the hardware improvements Sony has implemented in the PS5 Pro, such as the big upgrade to the GPU and PSSR, along with other new "tech innovations" such as the two terabytes of SSD storage, and Wi-Fi 7. Moreover, Aoki touched on why Sony decided to sell the disc drive separately. His response can be found below.

"For the disc drive, it is an option for players. Not all players have discs, even though most players may...but we have the option for being able to add that for those players. So I think it's more of the balance of the value proposition that we're giving," said Aoki