The PlayStation 5 Pro will be the most expensive modern console to date. The $700 device is supposed to offer a big leap in performance over the base PS5, plus it comes with 2 TB of storage for your games. What the PS5 Pro doesn’t come with is a cheap or easy way to play any physical game discs you might own. Even before PS5 Pro pre-orders start on Sept. 26, the disc drive users will need to play their physical copies are going fast and, in some cases, are already sold out.
The day after Sony showcased the PlayStation 5 Pro, Amazon and Best Buy’s websites showed the PS5 Disc Drive as completely sold out. As of this writing, it’s still available through GameStop, Target, Walmart, and PlayStation Direct. Gaming deals sleuth Wario64 on Twitter/X first spotted the lack of availability.
It’s too early to tell if the disc drive will suffer the same availability woes as the PlayStation 5 did for the first few years after release. It’s a more expensive console, so we can’t assume it will see the same demand. Sony execs previously said there weren’t any stock issues when it released the slim version of the PS5 in 2023. The company has been selling a digital edition and disc drive version of its PS5 since 2020, though it made the drive modular with last year’s release. With the PS5 Pro, that’s no longer the case.
Buying a Disc Drive for a PS5 Pro Makes an Expensive Console More Costly
We don’t have sales numbers, but if these drives are selling quickly, it points to a lingering demand for physical media. I don’t own many PS5 games on disc but regularly return to a big backlog of PS4 games to play on my console. For me and many other consumers, Sony’s more powerful $700 console is actually a $780 device. Even with an improved performance of 4K at 60 FPS, at those prices, I could be saving up for a quality budget gaming laptop or putting down cash on an Asus ROG Ally X.
The 2 TB SSD is a decent drive size for most game libraries but is still tight. The PS5 Pro still has room to add your own M2 SSD for extra storage. Owning your games on discs doesn’t save you that much storage space once installed. If you have a big library and want everything installed at once, you still might need an extra SSD. Those SSDs aren’t cheap, either. A 2TB WD_Black SSD will set you back $260 MSRP.
Microsoft’s Xbox Series S is still a download-only console with no disc drive. Despite that, leaked documents reportedly show it outsold the more powerful Xbox Series X three to one, at least going back to 2022. So, do players actually care about disc drives? Well, I’d argue they definitely should. Not only is it a function of backward compatibility (the PS5 Pro should play PS4 games with some extra benefits thanks to its “Game Boost” capability) and game preservation, but it’s also a matter of ownership.
The PS5 Pro Sets a Dangerous Precedent for the Future of Physical Games Media
Companies would prefer customers not to own the content they pay for. Digital downloads, including those from the PlayStation Store, are merely licenses to watch or play that media. Those licenses can and have been revoked, and customers have little to no recourse. Sony’s terms of service offer strict guidelines for keeping and using the games you buy on the PlayStation Store.
Even if game discs only operate as a kind of physical DRM to tell the great overlords at Sony you bought the game legally, there are other benefits to having a disc and a case. I can lend it to my friends. I can sell it off when I’m done. Many games still require online services to work at all, so even owning the disc doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be able to play a game in perpetuity. At the very least, it means the software contained inside is still potentially readable. Just look at what happened to some old, online-only Xbox titles when Microsoft deleted the Xbox 360 Store.
Consoles remain one of the few pieces of tech that still allow for physical media. There are so many other problems with the games industry that it would be a shame if that also went away.
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