Bloomberg is reporting this morning that Sony is working on a portable version of the PlayStation 5. This comes hot on the heels of news from Microsoft that a portable Xbox is being worked on, and of course ahead of the imminent announcement of the Switch 2. Everyone’s going handheld!
The shadowy figures who spoke to Bloomberg suggest this is “aimed at expanding Sony’s reach and contending with Nintendo,” although like Microsoft’s portable machine, it’s still “years away,” and clearly early enough that it could still end up being hung up in the gallery of abandoned hardware. But hey, it’s not like Sony doesn’t have priors when it comes to gaming on the move—the PSP is still beloved a decade on from its official discontinuation.
Nintendo’s success with the Switch is hard to overstate. This March it was reported that the Nintendo handheld had sold over 141 million units since its launch in 2017, beating the total of PS4s ever sold, and demonstrating that the market for a hybrid console/handheld is enormous. No wonder the two main rivals are sniffing around that territory, not least with Nintendo going straight into a second iteration of the Switch, rather than returning to a more permanent wheezy box.
Of course, that both Sony and Microsoft are “years out” from releasing anything is also indicative of just how slowly these cogs move, and given that current-gen phones are capable of playing some current-gen console games, it seems vanishingly unlikely that everyone won’t already have a super-powerful portable gaming system in their pocket by default by the time either company manages to get anything shipped.
Read More: Gaming’s Streaming Wars Are Here For Real Now
Of course, Sony has already had success with the PlayStation Portal, a handheld device that streams games from your PS5, and just this month announced a vast improvement to the device that’ll allow you to stream some games from the cloud, rather than simultaneously running them on your console. And guess what! Microsoft just launched exactly the same option for Xbox games, although on any device that runs a browser rather than a bespoke peripheral. The streaming wars have begun!
However, the Bloomberg story suggests the Portal was originally intended to be a fully independent handheld, suggesting Sony ran into serious difficulties seeing that realized. There’s a reason your PS5 is the size of a small building, and it’s not aesthetic. And sure, in a few years’ time, such tech will likely be small enough to fit into something handheld, but by then the expectations for graphics will be photorealistic 5D liquid-pixels and we’ll be back to exactly where we are now.
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