Who remembers the grim days of the Great PS5 Shortage?

A child of Covid, Sony’s PlayStation 5 was launched in November 2020. The timing proved bittersweet.

The upside was that people around the globe were stuck at home. They were renovating, bingeing on box sets, learning to bake sourdough bread and playing games. In its first five months on sale, the PS5 became America’s fastest selling console ever.

The downside was that Sony was one among many that couldn’t get its mitts on the bits that go inside the casing. In particular, blockages in the supply chain meant no computer chips.

As with so many “jigsaw” products – from guitars to cars – it only took one element to be unavailable and the whole production line ground to a halt.

ChannelNews reported on the issue at the time, including here.

By November 2021 Sony had sold 13 million units, but couldn’t keep up with demand. The following year was tough – scalpers were making merry with what was available, but Sony couldn’t get the product on shelves. By January 2023 30 million units had been sold.

Now, coming on four years since release, sales of the PS5 are at about 60 million units, and the gossip around the long-awaited PS5 Pro is gathering steam.

WCCFTech reported that at the recent Gamescom 2024 in Cologne, “developers started talking”. Such tattle is the lifeblood of the industry.

“In a recent live stream, the Italian website Multiplayer mentioned that it had heard from a developer that they had delayed their game due to the upcoming launch of the PS5 Pro,” said the website’s Alessio Palumbo. “I can confirm that I heard something similar during one of my appointments at Gamescom 2024.”

Palumbo went on to write that “Without even being prodded … a developer that I won’t name openly said they had received the specs of the PS5 Pro and were confident that Unreal Engine 5 would run much better on the new hardware compared to the regular PlayStation 5.

PS5 Slim Console.

“Considering the circumstances revealed by Multiplayer, I’m positive this is not the same developer they talked to. Moreover, the studio I heard it from is not at all a big one, which makes it clear the hardware’s specifications and details are already in the hands of a large number of game makers. As such, it is reasonable to assume an official announcement is near.”

Tipsters have predicted a 45% performance improvement in rasterised rendering with a larger GPU and faster memory; the potential to support 8K graphics, improved ray tracing architecture, and custom machine learning architecture.