It Is Wednesday: The Seven Hundred Club

Seven hundred dollars.

Seven. Hundred. Dollars. For a mid-gen refresh that nudges already-pretty graphics up to slightly-prettier, for a few particular games. Seven hundred dollars for the PlayStation 5 Pro.

Last night, I posted to all my socials that for seven hundred dollars, I could fund independent artists to make game assets and pass that value forward to the people who play the resulting game... and that it'd work just fine on a system that costs less than seven hundred dollars, too.

I've felt that the current console generation is an answer in search of a question, and this new console is an even bigger answer for an even more bewildering question. Who, exactly, is this for? When you break it down, there's a few conditions you have to meet before the PlayStation 5 Pro makes any sense whatsoever:

1. You have to expressly want to play PlayStation's system exclusive AAA photorealistic games on day one.

2. You have to be unwilling to accept the merely stunningly beautiful imagery of the PS5 and demand more.

3. You have to have enough disposable cash to see this as a good tradeoff.

There's a tangential use case -- people who didn't buy a PS5 at all and want in on the Sony ecosystem. The PS5 got scalped to hell and back, to the point where games kept being released for the PS4 because nobody could buy a PS5 and what's the point? But even then, why the Pro? Why the extra money for such a narrow benefit?

But let's put this exact console aside. Let's look at the larger issue.

The industry is absolutely fixated on delivering photorealism, to the exclusion of all common sense. Sure, these games cost upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars to make. They require crunching and destroying entire studios, and then purging their own talent to make up the cost. You have to market them and pray they become such a massive viral hit that they sell better than Atari thought E.T. would sell for the 2600, because otherwise the budget was wasted. You gamble everything on one idea -- that realistic graphics is the absolute goal. ...and then you fall flat on your face when the game itself is kinda meh, it can't possibly sell enough units to justify itself, and you have to burn the studio to the ground as a tax writeoff.

It doesn't make sense. It's irrational. For the cost of one PS5 Pro focused game you could fund a dozen smaller games, using stylized visuals and aesthetics and interesting gameplay mechanics to cover for a lack of big-budget high-fidelity graphics. You could make smaller bets so when some of them don't pan out, you aren't slicing your own throat. You could stop shooting for the moon and missing, landing a series of steady shots on a terrestrial target instead.

But shareholders demand more and more value, ever-increasing, always rising. They want bigger, bigger, biggest. All the money, not some of the money. All the money RIGHT NOW, not after a long-term investment. And so, the AAA industry gleefully steps off the ledge, assuming they will figure out how to fly before they hit the ground.