San Diego Studio has revealed that MLB The Show 25 will not offer any enhancements or improvements on PlayStation 5 Pro.
On their official FAQ, it says this:
“Does MLB The Show 25 have any features or settings that take advantage of the PlayStation 5 Pro hardware?
While the game runs smoothly on the PlayStation 5 Pro, it does not include any exclusive enhancements or features beyond the standard performance.”
Of course, as a first party game, and one of the few annualized titles made by a PlayStation studio, it is a little troubling that Sony wasn’t able to add any improvements to MLB The Show 25 so that it could earn the PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced label.
When Sony first announced the list of PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced games, it included a lot of high profile third-party AAAs. It was also clear that MLB The Show 24 did not make it to the list. At the time, it was easy to excuse it away. As an annualized game, San Diego may not have had time to really study PlayStation 5 Pro’s additions, especially PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution or PSSR.
But now, this omission seems to line up with a narrative that has grown surrounding PSSR. While Sony created the expectation that games would run better on PlayStation 5 Pro, because of the improvements in its hardware, the reality turned out to be quite disappointing. We reported on Silent Hill 2 and Alan Wake 2 running worse on the considerably pricier console. Some games also came up with patches that disabled PSSR, or gave you the option to disable it, like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
Let’s be clear on this; you don’t need to understand the finer details of how the PlayStation 5 Pro’s technology works. There’s no reason to be sympathetic with the struggles Sony or third parties had in leveraging the PlayStation 5 Pro’s capabilities, when Sony sold the console at $ 700. Sony has to make things right with the PlayStation 5 Pro users they have now, because it’s not fair to those consumers (and they could end up facing legal action over this at some point).
Of course, it would be better if San Diego Studio did not promise to make MLB The Show PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced if they could not deliver on it. It may be that they have already chosen to never even try to go for that certification, since they’re already busy keeping the games cross-save and cross-progression, as well as enabling cross-platform play, across multiple platforms.
That even includes the Nintendo Switch, so they may be better off working to keep their broad audience happy, than to focus on a subset of one of those groups to give them something other players don’t get. But maybe Sony will get their act together and make enhancing games for PlayStation 5 Pro easy enough that it will finally be worthwhile.
