Looks like the competition in the newly-established gaming handheld market has finally got Sony’s attention: Bloomberg reports that the Japanese gaming giant is planning to make a standalone handheld device that can play PS5 games on the go.
Sony’s (Real) Gaming Handheld In The Works
While the company has previously released the sort-of-handheld in the form of PlayStation Portal, it has a glaring limitation: this handheld only allows you to stream games from your own PS5 (though a recent update is adding cloud streaming capability), which greatly limits the device’s potential. Amongst the sea of handhelds like ASUS’s ROG Ally X, Valve’s Steam Deck, and Lenovo’s Legion Go handheld, the PlayStation Portal just doesn’t look like the same thing.
It’s also worth noting that Sony’s arch-rival in Microsoft is also planning to do the same, and this comes from a direct confirmation from Xbox boss Phil Spencer himself (though the product is, expectedly, many years away). Perhaps peer pressure forced the Japanese gaming giant to do something? Hard to say, as Sony originally intended the PlayStation Portal to be a standalone handheld, until plans changed and it ended up being tethered to the console instead.
One small titbit – recent leak on AMD’s upcoming GPU plans has briefly mentioned the Sony gaming handheld, which says will use Team Red’s hardware to power it. Given that PlayStation 5 is already AMD-powered, it’d be fairly convenient to keep the hardware consistent so there’s developmental resistance.
Ultimately, this likely proved to Sony that the Portal handheld was not it, and a real standalone device is needed to keep itself in the fight. The company is not unfamiliar with handhelds, mind you – it is the creator behind the PSP and the less-successful PS Vita handheld, but one crucial difference this time is the game library support. With Windows-based handhelds technically capable of supporting every game that runs on the PC, is Sony willing to lock its handheld within its ecosystem? Time will tell.
Source: Videocardz
Pokdepinion: It’s certainly a hard decision to make – PS Vita proved that a limited game library wouldn’t work, but would Sony go out of the way to tell developers to specifically design their games to fit within the limited power of the handheld?
