Sony should never have made the PS5 and kept it with the PS4

One reader suggests that Sony would have been better off releasing a more advanced PS4 Pro rather than starting the current generation with the PS5.

We’ve had a lot of unhappy PlayStation 5 owners write in recently, but the one that caught my eye was last week’s Reader’s Feature about someone who said they wouldn’t bother buying one because they didn’t see no sense in upgrading their PlayStation 4. As someone who made that jump, I can sympathize with that, even though it meant missing out on big franchises like Demon’s Souls, Returnal, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

However, I find it hard to imagine that these games wouldn’t be possible on a PlayStation 4. Maybe the graphics wouldn’t be as good (maybe not even for Returnal), but they’re definitely not doing anything to scream ‘ this must be the next generation!’

Your mileage may vary, but the point I’d like to make is that I’m not sure Sony gained anything by making the PlayStation 5, and they seem to have lost a lot in terms of how much more expensive it is to make games now. .

However, things were going well with the PlayStation 4. The games were good, the fans were happy, the PlayStation was easily beating the Xbox… Sony was at the top of their game. In the end, sales were starting to drop, as they always do, but instead of making the PlayStation 5, couldn’t they have just made a new model of the PlayStation 4? A Super PS4 Pro or something.

For such a small improvement in graphics, it really doesn’t seem like this generation was worth the effort, not considering all the problems it brought and considering how short it’s going to be. The only significant change has been the SSD, but make that part of the Super PS4 Pro and you have a unique selling point.

Of course, it’s too late now, but I don’t know of anything to suggest that Sony ever thought about it, and they haven’t said anything to imply that they’re going to take their time with the PlayStation 6. Instead, given that the Xbox already has said they’re working on a next-gen machine, I can’t imagine it’ll be that long until Sony starts talking about their next console.

This is nonsense. There is no other word for it. Sony and Microsoft knew that games would be even more expensive to make this generation, but they went ahead anyway. That would be fine, up to a point, if they had some sort of plan to deal with it. But clearly they didn’t. Instead, it seems like the problem took them by surprise, which is… stupid.

And now they will go ahead and make the same mistake again and make the problem worse. I can’t wait until the next gen games take seven years to make and cost $400 million each!

If you’re reading this and think that deliberately holding back and not going with higher-tech consoles when possible is the stupid thing to do, then consider Nintendo. They’ve been doing just that since the Wii and last time I checked they’re doing just fine. The way they talk also shows that they think a lot more about the long term than PlayStation and Xbox ever seem.

Someone out there must be strategizing things, but I’d like to know what the plan is. I have a bad feeling that the last step is ‘profit’ and the one before it is just ‘???’ – if you know what I mean.

So here’s my solution to the games industry’s current woes: buy Sony a time machine and invent the PlayStation 5. I’m sorry I couldn’t think of anything more practical.

From reader Hogie

Reader features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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