The digital store page for Ghost of Yotei features not one, but *two* “PS5 Pro Enhanced” badges. That’ll fix everything, right? Photo taken by the author.

Was the PS5 Pro a Mistake?

Game studios sure seem to think so

Gaming hardware is nothing without great software to make it shine.

The PlayStation 5 Pro is the most powerful console on the market, but more and more new games are skipping support for its custom features entirely or putting out half-hearted attempts that just run the “normal” PS5 version slightly better.

This doesn’t feel good at all, and it makes the machine feel like a failed experiment if they can’t even get developers to support it.

Sony launched the PS5 Pro at the end of last year in a flurry of big excitement and marketing. Its greatly enhanced graphical power made it the most capable gaming console ever released (so far). It should have been the console that brought the long-nascent ray tracing to the gaming masses, thanks to its beefier internal GPU. Also, the interesting and horribly named PSSR feature represented AMD’s first solid steps into the modern world of AI-based video game upscaling.

Big promises were made. Developers were urged behind the scenes to add PS5 Pro support to all of their upcoming titles in order to pass certification testing, and a handful of patches came out for older games as well. The PS5 Pro launch was supposed to be a landmark moment for Sony’s continued dominance in the console space. Its new…