Sony Group Corp. raised the price of its PlayStation 5 console by around 25% in Europe and in the UK ahead of a likely US increase.
The company announced the decision on its PlayStation blog, with Australia and New Zealand also affected, citing inflation and “a backdrop of a challenging economic environment.” The PS5 will cost €500 in Europe and £430 in the UK from Monday.
New, it’s hard to get under $500, but unless you plan to play entirely offline you will need a PS Plus subscription, which costs at least $80/year. If you have the console for 5 years, that’s an extra $400 just to use the thing and you can easily build a brand new PC that demolishes a PS5 for $900.
There is still a bigger initial cost, but you save so much in the longterm with a PC. I understand why people go for consoles, it’s so simple, but I’d never recommend one ever.
Subscription cost/value is hard to measure because you can get promos and sales plus you’re receiving a bunch of games as part of the package, so… sure, that’s 80 bucks a year for basic and what? 120+ for the higher tiers, but how much that is a straight add to the cost of the hardware does depend on how much of that money you’d have spent buying the games new (or still signing up to Game Pass if you were eyeing an Xbox instead, I suppose).
So that is valid back-of-the-envelope math, but not really accurate.
Plus the “only play offline” scenario is still a viable use case. I cancelled my PS Plus and Xbox Live subs because I only ever played offline games on consoles.
“I wouldn’t recommend one ever” is just not a reasonable stance today, and I don’t know if I’d say you can build a PC that “demolishes a PS5” for that money. What GPU would you need to do 4K60 or 1440p120 upscaled on AAA? The B580/4060 tier won’t cut it, you need one step up. A 4070 shows up for 650 bucks on my local Amazon. The 4060 Ti for 550. Current gen AMD is more expensive than that.
It’s not impossible to build a functional PC around that purchase, but man, you better be a savvy hardware guy or have one on hand. A quick glance shows my local trusted builders will give you a vanilla 8 Gig 4060 paired with an Intel i5 12th gen and 32 gigs of slow-ish DDR4. I mean, you’ll play some games, they’ll look fine with some tinkering, but that’s barely PS5 tier, let alone PS5 Pro. And that’s assuming you’re plugging that thing into a TV like a bulky, noisy console. Otherwise you’re gonna need a monitor to go with it.
Again, not saying it’s not an option. Absolutely the right move for a whole bunch of people.
But everybody? Sight unseen? In all circumstances? Yeah, nah. When my little cousin comes asking I’m not just pointing him at the cheapo trashcan PC, I’m asking questions. Do they have a laptop in good nick for work/school? Do they have a decent TV/monitor to use with it? What kinds of games do they want to play? It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing the way it was five to ten years ago.