PS5 Pro Pre-Orders Will Be Exclusive to PS Direct for Two Weeks

When we said we want more exclusives this isn't what we meant

Wow this gets really nasty

What's the preorder situation with PS Direct? Do you put down a deposit or pay upfront or... ?

Edit: payment when shipped - I'll be preording ASAP then 😁

They really don't help themselves do they

Thank you Sammy for taking the time to put the links to the UK sites. That's actually useful. I will be preordering.

You've always been my favourite 😊

But it isn't an added complication, it's actually a good idea for what should be obvious reasons.

Curious to see if scalpers will buy all of the units.

@themightyant please enough with the common sense!

But yeah I must admit I thought the same.

If it means the consoles go to legit players then it’s worth it.

Presumably they charge when it ships? As some would probably put a preorder in to buy more time to think it through.

Good way to deter scalping if they restrict it to one per customer.

@themightyant I might be naive but I am not sure this will get scalped given the price! they would have to charge like £800 or more to make a profit and that is without a disc drive or stand. Could be wrong and happy to be so

@jrt87 with my PSVR2 the money wasn't taken until the order shipped to arrive for release day.

@Americansamurai1 the orders will be restricted to one per household so scalpers will have to get creative.

@riceNpea That's good.

I've been critical of Pro reveal but this is good approach. Why is it 'an added complication'?

@Mostik what do you mean? This is to deter scalpers. Seems like Sony are damned if they do and damned if they don't if you think its wrong to keep orders exclusive to their store got a short period of time.

This is a behavior made by a company that doesn’t believe in it’s own product. Sony really wants the PS5 Pro to fail

@jrt87 don't know why PS think it's a problem. Seems sensible to me.

@riceNpea keeping their product locked to their page won’t deter scalpers at all. they will always find a way

@Loamy If it's a pre order then they won't charge you until it's in stock ready to ship. At least that's how it is for games and peripherals. So hopefully it's the same for consoles too.

@Savage_Joe the Pro is for enthusiasts, and is priced as an elite version of PS5. Like how there's an Elite version of the Dual Sense that costs 3 times as much.

Anyone interested in the first batch of Pros will know where to shop for it. It being on PS Direct deters scalpers and is a positive move from Sony.

Bit of a weird subheader - this is obviously a sensible idea.

@riceNpea time will tell, then

@Savage_Joe scalpers will find it MUCH easier to scalp if its being sold at every retailer. It's not foolproof but at least Sony are trying to mitigate the problem. Look at the bigger picture.

@riceNpea would have been funny to see them buy them all out just to get stuck with them

@Savage_Joe it will indeed. A two week window of exclusivity to PS Direct is not going to throttle the demand of a product that will be in short supply. And it will actually aid more people getting one as the preorder period is staggered rather than all available at once, where if you're slow, they're gone.

@Americansamurai1 I'd only find it funny as long as I get one 😊👍

@riceNpea lol this made me laugh after seeing ur rightful complaining in other comments sections

@Drago201 it's good that they listen, or at least Sammy does 😊

@themightyant exactly. I was hoping for this at the bare minimum, and potentially PS Stars level being used as a way to make sure it is going to active users. But this step will hopefully be enough on its own, touch wood 🪵😬

@riceNpea I don't think you'll have any issues..I think everyone who wants one will get one pretty easy since the support chain isn't hurt by covid like the PS5 early years.

@Americansamurai1 cool. Now, I just need games to play on it 😁

I expected this because they can make far more money per sale selling directly than they can through retailers. I intend to wait for the PS5 Pro, so I can use my Circle card (previously called Red card) and get 5% off. It's not much, but it's something.

Yeah this is a sensible decision out of all the chaos of yesterday.

This is the best way to combat scalpers and also gives retailers more time to get as many units as possible to have available.

Rather this than the bloodbath we had in 2020.

@riceNpea Oh I agree buddy, I hope it does but I just mean I don't think it will be scalped to the levels of the PS5 where we see pictures of them on pallets in some scalpers garage happily charging customer 1.5 or 2x the price.

@riceNpea we need a showcase lol

Why would anyone be sold on buying this thing? Paying an insane price to get fidelity and performance mode combined? They should have showed a new game running on it. Give us a reason to buy it.

@themightyant Unfortunately I suspect you could be right, but wasn't the graphics card issue driven mainly by crypto bro's?

@get2sammyb yes sony gets more money this way less middlemen

So any tips for locking in a PS5Pro via PS Direct? I never ordered anything through there. Just added my adress to save some time with the checkout. How does the Queue thingy work? Will i need to be online at 26sep 00:00hr? Or would it be possible to order a console through the day?

@Mostik Nvidia started nerfing this on 30 series cards made after a certain date.

The 40 series was a lot of hype and demand. I believe they also diverted lots of stock to China before bans came in

It almost seems like they don't want us to buy it, lol.

@Ravix Stars level would be pretty cheap way to determine "active user". I have used my PS5 a lot this year and my Stars level is still 1 because I don't actually buy anything from PSN.

In order to achieve Level 2, I would need to make a full game purchase off PSN. Pretty garbage move to lock Stars levels behind digital-only purchase, if you ask me!

Not that I ultimately care about my Star level, just saying it's not a reliable source of determining who is "Active" on PlayStation.

Wonder if they will send out email invites
And what time preordering will begin UK.

Sell out highly likely within 30 minutes of going live.

Hoping we get some info as to the time of day so we can avoid missing out. I think stock will be hard to come by well into 2025.

@themightyant also do they accept kidneys as a form of payments

@GamingFan4Lyf well, I mean, you actually signed up, so maybe that lol I was just thinking of some way of determining the buyer is not just an email address and a PO box 😅 I'm sure they can track that you've got trophies for gameplay etc. Just thinking of an extra level to stop scalpers 😅 but like I said, hopefully this is enough protection for buyers as it is and the people that want one can get one

This is so they can control the narrative, but like government, because they know they won’t sell that many units.

Hopefully they can justify this with strict anti scalpers rules and measures.

@roe An owning a bank, it not like Sony isn't set up to do this.

Not really a complication at all. Because for the first time people will be able to buy a PlayStation 5 console at launch. There can’t be any scalpers and bots grabbing this overly expensive piece of hardware and then adding the beautiful dynamic pricing everyone is loving at the minute. £699 retail price and then adding whatever price to it, £800 upwards, are you really that desperate console lovers???

Not sure this deters scalpers. It requires an active PSN account, but it doesn't say anything about it needing to be a 5 year old PSN account with at least 4 digital games purchased on it - any bot could make 2000 PSN accounts with delivery addresses within the scalper network and buy them out. That's how it always works.

To deter scalpers they'd have to restrict sales to PSN accounts that meet certain criteria indicating it's an active user, but that would be exclusionary to casual or first time buyers, so it's a slippery slope. I tire of these companies adopting the Nintendo strategy of underproducing to increase FOMO.

@themightyant One consideration with 4090 being a somewhat special case is it's not just competing with the gaming market but also the commercial video editing market with both normal professional use and youtubers scrambling to get them because it's the only nVidia GPU with AV1 and 24GB VRAM making it a useful video production tool, and $1600 much cheaper than the $2400 A5500 professional card to do the same job.

So 4090 gets artificially boosted, and it's market/scalper market artificially boosted because it's not just the halo/premium gamer enthusiast product but it's also the bottom barrel budget commercial product for making money from. It's not a 100% even comparison. Nobody's buying a PS5 Pro as a commercial tool to generate revenue.

@Mostik yeah $1600 4090s were scalped, 5090s at probably $1800 or $2k will be too. They know they can do it, and they collude to intentionally consume all MSRP inventory to ensure the markup is the only way to buy.

I've hardly read any positive comments in any of the ps5 Pro articles. Hardly anybody commenting sounds like they are going to buy it anyway but everybody's getting worked up over this pre order scheme as well..why does it bother people so much when they have already announced they are not purchasing one? I just don't get it..

@The_Wailing_Doom Yes, great prospect for Sony: digital-only (with PS6) means no share for retailers and higher average game prices, and direct hardware sales help them both with higher profits and less dependency on retailers, see Apple. And other premium hardware companies (Dyson) will follow.
The end of classical electronics retailers?

This is gonna be a cluster...I just know it.

I don't get why it's 'an added complication'? Haven't they been doing the same with limited edition stuff?
Personally if I'm ordering something like this I'd rather there be fewer links in the chain, and it'll give Sony a good idea how demand actually is for the product. Although it seems Sony have used the pricing to join the scalpers rather than best them.

I've softened on the idea of it but likely won't preorder one, may even refuse to buy one new. With a disc drive it shouldn't be more than £700. Doing the maths using the US price the console and disc drive should be under 720 quid, and as a bundle they could slice the £20 and still be making money. Fecking charlatan's.

Day one! Gonna be a sell out I know many who are buying to resell on ebay. There's money to be made here

@themightyant wait for the disc drives....

@nedbvai there you go....

They are pissing everyone off with this. Players with the insane pricing and offer and retailers with their own shop.
It's been a while since i saw Sony this greedy (ps3 reveal days) and it's not good to see it.

But, it's a general trend of the market and will have it's own consequences.

@themightyant graphics cards were being used by crypto miners and there was less of them available. Made sense for scalpers to do their wormy thing.

Cutting out the middle man is a great idea if you want to keep your products competitive price wise. Seems like that’s not the case though

@themightyant True to a point. We're living in a new gilded age. Anyone who can afford one of something can afford 20. Anyone who can't afford 20 can't afford 1.