It’s been nearly half a year since the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S came out, and gamers have been experiencing great things with them, from zero loading screens to the never-before-seen 4K 60 FPS on a console. However, it doesn’t change the fact that both are priced at £449, which is quite a big investment for a console. After all, the last console generations to at £449 were PS3 (which the Xbox 360 beat by a margin until the next generation was already on store shelves) and Xbox One.
Plus, the PS4 and Xbox One were ‘next-gen’ when they came out, too, with PS4’s launch price set at £349 and Xbox One’s £449 price-tag supposedly justified by the advanced Kinect system. Xbox One would lose the mandatory Kinect and drops its price to match that of PS4 within six months of launch.
This begs the question: are Sony and Microsoft justified in selling £449/€499 consoles today? Let’s find out.
Performance
As mentioned, one of the biggest feats of both the PS5 and Xbox Series is the fabled 4K 60 FPS (1440p for the Series S) gameplay. Because of hardware limitations, the PS4 and Xbox One could only manage 1080p 30 FPS (with some honourable exceptions later in the generation). Modern RAM, optical drives, and other peripherals are much more powerful and lightweight, so next-gen consoles are able to keep their relatively small sizes despite the considerable power they have.
As an added bonus for all of that beautiful performance overhead, the menus of both consoles are much smoother to navigate. This spare power also allows for extras like ‘Quick Resume’.
Graphics
Both consoles use different versions of the AMD Radeon RDNA Navi GPU — codenamed ‘Big Navi’ because of its unparalleled performance — which has greatly helped them gain that PC-quality graphics you see in their trailers. Big Navi may not be as powerful as NVIDIA’s RTX 3070 (the top GPU in the market today), but it does have a feature called ‘Smart Access Memory’. This gives the system’s CPU direct access to the graphics card, which takes out latency that usually occurs for this process. The end result, then, are consoles that can render assets in milliseconds, so the PS5 and Xbox Series don’t have loading screens any more.
Backward Compatibility
Microsoft was fortunate enough to have worked backward-compatibility into their two previous consoles so they only needed to apply the same emulation principles in the Xbox Series. This is why the console supports backward compatibility with original Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One games.
On the other hand, since they hadn’t created backward-compatibility on PS4, Sony wasn’t as lucky. However, they managed to make the PS5 backward compatible for one generation through software emulation with help from their GPUs coming from the same family.
Given all that, is the £449/€499 price tag justified?
Between the new hardware and additional components, both Sony and Microsoft have plenty of reason to sell their consoles at £449. True enough, a post about Altium 365 emphasises how components make up to 70% of an electronics product’s cost. And considering how packed the PS5 and Xbox Series are, it’s no surprise that they’re priced this high. In fact, the PS5, which has more extra hardware, is being sold at a loss. According to an article on EuroGamer, the company is banking on software sales to profit from the console eventually.
Therefore, if you do get the opportunity to buy any of the next-gen consoles, know that you’re getting more than your money’s worth. Let’s just hope that more units become available.
