PS5 Price May Be Higher than PS4 Due to 'Advanced Feature Set'

The PS5 price may be more than the PS4 if statements from Sony's Lead Systems Architect Mark Cerny are any indication. While Sony has laid bare what to expect from the PS5 in terms of specifications, backwards compatibility, and the inclusion of a solid state drive in conversation with Wired, there was no mention of the console's price. Turns out that part of the discussion didn't make it to the story. According to Peter Rubin, Senior Correspondent at the publication, the PS5's price did come up in his meeting with Cerny.

"I believe that we will be able to release it at an SRP [suggested retail price] that will be appealing to gamers in light of its advanced feature set," Cerny said to Rubin. This revelation has arisen following intense speculation of the PS5's price what with it shipping with a solid state drive, which is still an expensive proposition. Usually pricing on a new console is announced closer to release. For example, the PS4's price revealed at E3 2013 in June with the console shipping in November. Chances are we're in for a similar situation this time around.

That said, hopefully Sony sticks to the $399 price tag for the PS5 like it did for the PS4 at launch. Reason being, the console market isn't exactly welcoming of higher price points. It's something we saw with the Xbox One at launch and the PS3 as well. And in markets like India, even $399 is too much for a vast majority as that usually translates to Rs. 39,990 if the PS4 India launch price was any indication. Perhaps Sony will launch with multiple variants like it did with the PS3?

The PS5 will feature a CPU based on the third-generation of AMD's Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company's new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. As for the GPU, it would be a custom variant of the AMD Radeon Navi family with ray tracing support to boot. It will be backwards compatible with PS4 games as well.

Though for Cerny, the biggest improvement will be the addition of an SSD which he referred to as "a true game changer" and "the key to the next generation".

"I have an SSD in my laptop, and when I want to change from Excel to Word I can wait 15 seconds," he said while demonstrating load times of Spider-Man on PS4 Pro versus Spider-Man on a PS5 developer kit with the difference being 15 seconds versus 0.8 seconds according to Wired. Furthermore, the game world loaded faster, resulting in a more responsive camera as well.

While Sony isn't giving details on the SSD specifications, Cerny hinted at the possibility of propriety tech at play.

"The raw read speed is important," he said. "But so are the details of the I/O [input-output] mechanisms and the software stack that we put on top of them. I got a PlayStation 4 Pro and then I put in a SSD that cost as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro—it might be one-third faster."

This lines up with previous leaks that have suggested the presence of an SSD or a regular hard drive with "some sort of NAND flash".

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