Sony’s controller price increase highlights the PS5’s biggest problem

“But what about feedback?” I hear you ask. “The DualSense has linear rumble motors and adaptive triggers!” 

And sure, that’s true. But neither of those features are necessary for any PS5 game. There’s not a single PS5 game that absolutely requires them. And do you know why that is? Because you can turn both of those features off at the system level. So while Sony says that PS5 games are “designed to take advantage of its immersive new features,” there’s a big difference between taking advantage of a feature and requiring it, and the PS5 definitely does not require it. Sony’s excuse just doesn’t stack up. 

There’s an accessibility issue at play here, too. For some players, not only is the DualShock 4 more comfortable than the DualSense, it might even be the only way they can play. And that’s to say nothing of the custom solutions and third-party controllers that enabled more accessibility options on the PS4, all of which are now entirely unusable in PS5 games. Sony says it’s serious about accessibility, and the PlayStation Access controller is a genuinely great piece of kit, but accessibility is about more than just one specific controller — it’s about offering as many options as possible, and locking off an entire ecosystem of controllers is about as far from that as you can get. 

You want to know the worst part, though? You can already play PS5 games with a DualShock 4 controller, officially too. The DualShock 4 is one of the very few controllers that’s officially compatible with PS Remote Play, and it doesn’t discriminate — you can use a DualShock 4 to play PS5 games, or a DualSense to play PS4 games, and it all works with absolutely no issues. You just plug it into your PC or pair it via Bluetooth to your phone, and you’re good to go. But that comes with its own problems, like the latency introduced, the lower resolution, the iffy performance depending on your network environment, and those compromises aren’t a fair solution. 

There’s another way to use PS4 controllers on PS5, too, and it doesn’t require you to use Remote Play… but it’s only in a few games. Most fighting games on PS5 have wired PS4 controllers whitelisted, so they can be used on the PS5 just fine, albeit only while connected via a cable. This is presumably so fighting game players don’t have to shell out for another expensive fight stick – those things can cost a pretty penny – when they’ve already got a perfectly good one. But you know what else is perfectly good? The half-dozen DualShock 4 controllers sitting on my shelf, gathering dust because they’re needlessly blocked on the system Sony wants me to use. It’s clear that this isn’t a technical problem, it’s an ideological problem. 

So why did Sony do this? There’s only really one possible reason: money. If you own a PS5, and you want to play a local multiplayer game, you have to buy a new controller. You have to buy a DualSense. If you and a friend want to go head-to-head in Tekken 8, you have to buy another DualSense. If the whole family wants to play Sackboy: A New Adventure together, you’ll have to buy three more DualSense controllers, even if you have a dozen perfectly good DualShock 4s lying around. And thanks to this new price increase, doing so just got more expensive. 

• See more: Sony may announce the PS5 Pro at PlayStation Technical Presentation