Summary
PlayStationopenedpre-orders for the PS5 Proandits 30th anniversary collectionlast Thursday and when it did, chaos ensued. Well, it did for the anniversary stuff. Everything from the limited edition bundle to thePS1-styleDualSenseis sold out. However, four days later,the regular PS5 Pro is still readily available at PlayStation Direct.
The PS5 Pro was revealed a few weeks agoalong with its price - $700. It was the price that caused controversy as people questioned whether the upgrades it brings are worth such a high price. The complaints about the $700 price tag were drowned out somewhat bythe 30th-anniversary collection announcement, even though that announcement includeda grey PS5 Pro bundle limited to just 12,300 units that cost $1,000.
PlayStation may well have underestimated just how important the anniversary design of the PS5 Pro was to people, perhaps hoping that once the grey console bundles had sold out, people would turn to the regular PS5 Pro instead. Either that has happened and PlayStation has a lot of stock of the Pro console, or that’s not what happened and people who tried and failed to get an anniversary Pro bundle didn’t turn to the white version of the console , likely just picking up an anniversary DualSense instead and calling it a day.
The PS5 Pro Is Still Readily Available
The Normal One, Not The Grey One, Sorry
That PlayStation has staggered the release of PS5 Pro pre-orders strongly suggests it was expecting to quickly sell out of the console despite the vociferous complaints about its price. Even though the Pro console is available now through PlayStation Direct, pre-orders won’t be available at Amazon andother major retailers until Jul 24, 2025. There was likely an expectation that Direct would have run out of Pros by then, but as it stands, they’ll still be available there once they become available elsewhere.
PlayStation 5 Pro
The PS5 Pro is the mid-gen upgrade for PlayStation’s PS5. While its design is almost identical to that of the slimmer model of a regular PS5, the Pro promises to improve the visuals of lots of key games and also has a 2TB SSD, doubling the storage space of a regular PS5.
It’s certainly a far cry from the launch of the basePS5almost four years ago. Getting your hands on a PS5 was not only almost impossible at launch, but basically for its entire first year and into its second holiday season. Perhaps an indicator to PlayStation that the days of the mid-gen refresh are over, or at the very least charging such a high price was a mistake. Maybe if the anniversary version of the Pro was the only version of the console, and it wasn’t limited to 12,300 units, it would have been a different story.
