I think this generation doesn't need a Pro console because:
- AAA games take >5+ years to be done + most of the ones under development suffered the covid delay
This was the case last gen too, even without COVID and lockdowns, so I don't see why that's now a concern.
- We're maybe a handful years away to see AAA released games that were started having the specs/devkits of the next gen consoles since the start
Isn't this where the concept of "rolling generations" comes into play? Plus we're getting to a point where it's not the hardware being so much the bottleneck anymore, so much as the budgets, manpower, and time of development (plus overall team talent & leadership). In any case, a Pro system would make whatever is already being worked on, run at better rates than the base system with no effort needed from the developers.
- We're maybe a handful years away to see AAA released games that were started having next gen engines capable to take full advantage of this gen hardware
Same as the previous point.
- Studios needed a few years to fully adapt themselves changing their pipeline to take advantage of next new technologies similar to Lumen or Nanite plus super fast streaming fro SSD
How does a Pro system negate these developments? Again, all the same tech is there, but it'll just let whatever devs have been working on, run even better than the base system can run it at. And there's a portion of the market who would pay for that type of privilege, so why deny them the chance if you know volumes will be small enough to accommodate that demand, and have good profit margins on the hardware while still getting bragging points as having the "most powerful console" on the market?
That's a win-win-win.
- Majority of the console and PC players continue using previous gen hardware, so made sense for devs to continue supporting it
Again, same thing with PS4 & PS4 Pro. This doesn't suddenly become worst or a bad idea now that we've moved up a generation.
All that means that probably we won't see AAA games taking full advantage of current gen consoles until late 2025 or beyond, around a year after the supposed release of PS5 Pro.
Meaning, they'll take even full advantage of the PS5 Pro hardware and we'll see a quality spike around a year after its release in base PS5 hardware. As spike that will also appear around a couple years before the PS6 release.
You're missing the obvious fact though, that any PS5 game on the base system that doesn't have a specific bottleneck like say the CPU (assuming the CPU in the Pro won't be much more than base PS5's), will automatically get a performance uplift by simply running on hardware with more system resources.
And if the game is optimized for the new hardware, an even bigger performance uplift.
On top of that, releasing a more powerful PS5 would mean to sell it for a more expensive price than the current one, which could be too expensive. And devs, specially multiplatform ones, already have to support a lot of SKUs and they'd prefer to have less, not more.
The multi-SKU situation isn't an issue when the base hardware (PS5 in this case) is already performant enough for current-gen games, and the SDK & APIs are very easy to use, particularly compared to competing platforms like Xbox. Which, FWIW, has a SKU that holds most of its diminishing market share, that is not up to the task for the majority of current-gen AAA game releases.
Those are problems with PlayStation, so it's unnecessary to posit this as an industry issue when it's specifically an Xbox issue. And these same concerns were around, I'm sure, for the PS4 Pro, yet none of these problems actually manifested for games after that platform released. Why would they suddenly manifest this generation?
If the PS5 Pro is going to be a testing ground of sorts for certain tech that could be further evolved upon for the PS6, it actually helps to let devs start testing with that tech in releases sooner rather than later. So that they can begin adjusting parts of their dev pipelines for what a 10th-gen console can bring, getting hard parts out of the way earlier to make way for other aspects of software development which can lead to more inventive and higher-polished games.
