It's Falling Behind Its Predecessor's Pace

The PS5 Pro was released on November 7th, 2024. It promised an improvement on existing PS5 hardware, featuring a 45% faster GPU, a deep learning image upscaling technology, ray tracing that’s twice as fast as the PS5, and 2 TB of SSD storage.

This allows the PS5 Pro to 4K resolutions at 60 FPS for optimized games. That all sounds well and good, but there’s a catch: the thing costs a whopping $700.

Developer Breaks Down Black Ops 6 PS5 Pro Improvements

Looking good and running smoothly are not mutually exclusive.

As a result, fans were a little unsure if the PS5 Pro was worth the investment. That’s starting to translate into sales data, as, according to Mat Piscatella, the PS5 Pro is not selling as well as the PS4 Pro did.

January Video Game Hardware Spending Dropped 45% Year to Year Across the Board

Overall, spending on video game consoles was down in the month, so this isn’t solely a Sony issue.

PS5 hardware spending fell by 38%, while Xbox Series sales fell by 50%. Nintendo Switch saw a 53% drop, though that comes following the long-awaited reveal of its successor, which is set to launch later this year.

People aren’t going to heavily invest in a console that’s about to be outdated. At the same time, however, it’s becoming clear that they’re not going to overpay for a console just because it offers cutting-edge features.

Black Ops 6 Tops US Sales Charts For Jan. 2025 While FF7 Rebirth On Steam Gives RPG Sales Boost

The top 10 best-selling games for PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo for January 2025 are listed.

In total, 2025 is the lowest January for video game hardware, at $205 million, compared to January 2020 ($131 million).

The entire industry saw a drop as well. Projected U.S. consumer spending on video game hardware, content, and accessories fell 15% compared to last year, but still ahead of January 2023’s numbers by 0.3%.