- The recently announced PS5 Pro won’t be sold with a disc drive.
- The add-on component is already mostly sold out among Australian retailers.
Last week, Sony announced the PlayStation 5 Pro, which comes with additional storage, a faster GPU and AI-driven upscaling. Despite these upgrades, the PS5 Pro is missing one thing: a disc drive. So if you prefer to buy your games physically, you’ll need to purchase that for extra.
That is if you can actually find a PS5 disc drive in stock anywhere.
While the PS5 5 Pro isn’t due to hit stores until November 7th (preorders go live on September 26th), the disc drive add-on is already selling out across Australian retailers, such as JB Hi-Fi, The Good Guys and Harvey Norman. You can’t even buy it from Sony directly.
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Unsurprisingly, none of this has stopped scalpers from trying to capitalise on the disc drive’s sudden and potentially lucrative demand. If you head over to eBay, there are a fair few recent listings for the add-on, with prices sitting around the $350 mark (at retail, for reference, it’s priced at $159.95). Much like a PS5 disc, time is a flat circle.
By itself, the act of buying a PS5 Pro in Australia is already going to set you back an eye-watering $1,199.95. So adding an additional $160 – potentially more if you’re desperate – is a bit of a pain if you’re someone who favours physical media.
Admittedly, when you consider that most physical games sell for much cheaper than their digital equivalents, the drive pays for itself.
This digital-only focus seems to be the future of home consoles – Microsoft has also announced a disc-free version of the Xbox Series X that’s due out in October. The disc drive was released last year as an add-on for the digital-only PS5 Slim.
The knock-on from this is that we’ll no doubt see fewer game companies offering physical releases over the next few years, which tracks with the current market. According to a recent consumer report published by the IGEA, digital purchases (including full games, in-game purchases and subscriptions) accounted for around $1.67 billion of all video game sales in Australia in 2023 – up 11% from 2022’s figures. Meanwhile, traditional retail sales accounted for $1.15 billion of the total $4.4 billion.
Sony is, no doubt, pushing more of these drives into production as we speak. While the original PS5 was plagued with stock issues when it first launched in 2020, due to a semiconductor chip shortage, it’s probably safe to assume that the disc drive is a comparatively easier piece of tech to manufacture. Hopefully a restock, at retail prices, is imminent.
