Just days after Sony confirmed that the PS5 is entering “the latter stage of its life cycle,” CNBC reports that the oft-rumored PS5 Pro is on track to launch later this year.
Mid-cycle updates have become increasingly common for game consoles in recent years. Sony launched the PlayStation 4 Pro back in 2016, Microsoft introduced the Xbox One X in 2017, and Nintendo has revised the Switch twice since 2019 with the Lite and OLED models.
Analysts told CNBC that the PS5 refresh is likely to arrive in the second half of 2024. Sony is not only hoping to reinvigorate interest in a console for which it recently cut its sales forecast from 25 million units to 21 million units for the fiscal year but also have fresh hardware on the market in time for the highly anticipated launch of Grand Theft Auto 6.
“There seems to be a broad consensus in the game industry that Sony is indeed preparing a launch of a PS5 Pro in the second half of 2024,” Kantan Games CEO Serkan Toto told CNBC. “And Sony will want to make sure to have a great piece of hardware ready when GTA VI hits in 2025, a launch that will be a shot in the arm for the entire gaming industry.”
Planning a hardware launch around the arrival of a single game might sound like overkill, but it’s really hard to overstate how successful the last Grand Theft Auto was. GTA 5 is the second best-selling video game of all time, behind only EA’s mobile version of Tetris.
There’s no doubt that GTA 6 will be one of the biggest games of this generation, if not one of the biggest games ever. If Sony can claim that playing on the PS5 Pro is the best way to experience the latest title from Rockstar Games, that could end up going a long way.
Looking back, Sony announced the PS4 Pro on September 7, 2016. The console launched just two months later, on November 10. If Sony sticks to a similar timeline for PS5 Pro, don’t expect to hear anything official about the console until the second half of the year.
