Of course they get extra money for the extra effort: they will get money from PS4 Pro owners which wouldn't buy PS4 versionswithout PS4P-optimasation (or only buy these unoptimized versions heavily reduced).

Sure, this group of PS4 gamers rewarding the extra effort may be small at first... but it will grow.

This is just to allow the game to output at 4K using the checkerboard pattern, and leaving the rest of the game un-modified. This has absolutely nothing to do with actually optimizing the game to take full advantage of the additional hardware. That will take significantly more time, and you'll probably see very few third party developers put in the time and the effort to maximize the potential of the extra power. You're right, pro mode is much less work than a standard port between platforms, but a standard port between platforms can easily take years of man hours and does cost millions of dollars.

It absolutely isn't ridiculous for someone to claim properly supporting Neo-mode could cost some developers millions.

We are not talking about games built from the ground up for Pro or deep optimizations but just general Pro support. People were saying hardly any games would take advantage of the new hardware saying it would be too expensive. What you are saying is a completely different thing. Of course developers can choose to go all-in and for some bigger titles the Pro features could cost in the millions.

Yeah I mean... even a title which had a $100m budget using an additional .3% to add those lovely looking pro features to it would add somewhere in the region of $300,000 if all things are equal in the developement (obviously they aren't, voice actors / music licensing and marketing would be a far larger % than the people who would be working on features like adding these rendering effects) which isn't a huge deal of cash at all in the grand scheme of things.

Yeah that is true but for a major AAA release on consoles they would pretty much have to playtest the game again and make sure that after that switch is flicked that the whole game doesn't seize up at a certain point or reduce itself back to 90p resolution at points haha.

Beta-testers are even cheaper than programmers

But that's what people like me were saying. This here really isn't taking advantage of the new hardware. This is barely scratching the surface - the bare minimum to pass certification. There were rumors around the developers I know that Sony was going to require more than just this 4k checkerboard output in order to pass certification, that developers were going to have to demonstrate the ways in which the games take advantage of the additional processing power of the neo as part of the new certification process. This clearly was a big concern. It appears that either that rumor was false, or Sony dropped that requirement.

It ain't "just a different output method" of the same native rendered resolution. The PS4 Pro has to render two 1920x1080 images instead of one 1920x1080 image per frame as source for the 4K-checkerboard-image. So a PS4P-game with 4K-checkerboard-resolution is taking advantage of the additional hardware. Other games will offer PS4-modes with 1920x1080 in 60 fps instead of 1920x1080 in 30 fps or they will use better anti-aliasing or they will use different postprocessing-effects (f.e. shadows) ... that is also taking advantage of the additional hardware.

And all these options aren't taking much time/effort to set up and a few beta testers / QA members can test which presets work best or are problematic. Every modern game engine is scalable. It is no rocket science.

Eh. Idk about that cause if it is a AAA game, I am sure they will buy it regardless...

Converting the average consumer to the Pro might take considerably more effort though.