Alright, Sony. It’s time to call it quits. You’ve had a good run with the PlayStation brand. PS1 was the coolest gaming system of the ‘90s. You followed that up with the record-breaking PS2, which at north of 155m units sold, remains the most successful home console ever. PS3 (after a rocky and pricey start) and PS4 also went on to become widely successful. Currently, the PS5 is smashing the Xbox Series X in the sales charts to boot.
All good things must come to an end, though.
Said end could be the $699/£699 PS5 Pro. While I half-jokingly wrote the above headline, there’s also a kernel of truth in there. If you asked me right now, I’d wager a couple of bucks that the lifetime sales of PlayStation ports on PC, which are becoming increasingly frequent, will top the amount of money the Japanese giant makes from its newly announced, fairly niche upgraded console.
I really never thought I’d find myself typing this, but here goes: PlayStation ports on the best gaming PCs are almost becoming too good. I know first-hand what a big deal soccer has become in the U.S. so hopefully you’ll get my meaning when I say Sony has just scored its hattrick ball with God of War Ragnarök this year.
Truly impressive PC ports
Back in March, Nixxes’ PC conversion of Horizon Forbidden West provided a gorgeous and silky smooth experience for those lucky enough to own one of the best gaming laptops. The porting specialists then followed that up in May with the best PS5 port I’ve ever seen in Ghost of Tsushima.
Kratos and Loki’s superb action-adventure has never looked or played better now that it’s found a home on PC.
Now it’s Jetpack Interactive’s time to shine. Working with GoW Ragnarök’s OG developer, Santa Monica Studio, the team's work on Kratos and Loki’s superb action-adventure has never looked or played better now that it’s found a home on PC.
Sony is on such a run with the quality of its ports, if you’ve got a semi-decent PC and a PS5 Slim, it’s now legitimately worth considering whether you should wait 18 months until that console “exclusive” probably arrives on Steam.
Deck the halls
For full transparency, I’ve mainly been playing Ragnarök on an RTX 4090-powered PC. It's a rig so powerful, it would definitely beat the snot out of PS5 Pro, let alone the rumored PS6. With settings switched to “Ultra” and with Nvidia DLSS enabled, I’ve never once seen this awesome PlayStation sequel drop below 100 fps on my super ultrawide (5,120 x 1,440) Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 monitor.
Yet the quality of a PC port should never be evaluated on how well a game runs on the best hardware out there. A truly elite version of a PS5 classic should be able to run on one of the best gaming handhelds, like my beloved Steam Deck OLED.
As you can see from that image above, God of War Ragnarök looks fantastic on Steam’s handheld sensation.
Obviously, you have to make compromises to get performance to a decent level on the Deck. But such is the almost effortless class of the OLED model’s HDR display. Dialing settings back to low (with a combination of Intel Xess supersampling), produces darn good results to the naked eye in motion. And from my experience, said presets comfortably lock you in at 30 fps, while looking mighty fine.
Though the official Xbox Windows app isn’t great, when one of the best Xbox Series X games is cooking on PC, the results can be special. Just look at Forza Horizon 5. As a counterpoint, and this is a little embarrassing if you’re an employee of Microsoft — the company that literally created by far the most popular operating system in the world — is now arguably being outdone by Sony when it comes to PC ports.
Sure, The Last of Us Part 1 on PC was a bit of a disaster when it was initially released. Thankfully, post-launch patches finally banged it into shape, and Naughty’s classic is now in fine shape on PC platforms.
Yet before then, the poster Spartan for Xbox Series X/Xbox Series S on PC was the shaky port of Halo Infinite. It wasn’t terrible (far from it), but it’s no exaggeration to say you could be play it on a rig that costed 10 times as much as the Series X at launch and the results weren’t as smooth on PC (regardless of what your frame counter was telling you).
God of Whoa!
The go big take from all of the above? Sony is potentially putting itself in dangerous (but still profitable) waters. Priced at $699, gamers have rarely been faced with a situation where you could put a (mostly) on par gaming PC together for roughly the cost of what’s now officially the most expensive home console of all time.
We’re finally getting to the tipping point where console costs are approaching mid-end PC prices.
I get that assembling your own PC may well be daunting if you’ve never done it before. The “they just work” appeal of consoles is undeniable. My counterpoint to that is PCs are about as difficult to put together as Lego (providing you have a bunch of screwdrivers). Google “RTX 4060 Ti” and “AMD Ryzen 7 5880X” and you’re looking at the two main components that can provide you with (theoretically) a PS5 Pro level of power.
Obviously you have to factor in the costs of buying one of the best gaming monitors (which are cheaper than you probably think), a PC case, keyboard and mouse. Yet a PC can do soooo much more than either a PS5 or PS5 Pro. And with the latter, we’re finally getting to the tipping point where console costs are approaching mid-end PC prices.
That’s a bit of a problem for the Pro, no question. When Sony and its porting partners are routinely churning out exceptional PC versions only a year after the fact, even the upgraded console and its “PSSR” super sampling tech are unlikely to match the results you can achieve on a decent rig. In essence, the PS5 Pro is targeting a niche market at a price point where those same gamers could be lured away by the company's increasingly strong library of PC ports.
To be clear, PC gaming is in no way niche. At last count, Steam has more than 130 million users. For context? As of June 2024, Sony has sold 61.7m PS5s (thanks, Men's Journal).
Sony has a massive opportunity here. There's no reason it can't continue to court both hardcore PlayStation fans with the PS5 Pro, while also servicing the needs of PC gamers who happen to love the fabulous library of exclusive games Sony has built up over the last decade. Yet it's still a careful balancing act.
As much as my RTX 4090 puts me off the idea of shelling out for the PS5 Pro — especially while I still value the original 2020 console — my current thinking is that I'll wait until the PS6 rolls around.
