Sony Working on Handheld Console for PS5 Games to Rival Switch (bloomberg.com) 9
Sony is developing a new portable gaming device capable of playing PlayStation 5 games, Bloomberg News reported Monday. The project follows the 2023 release of PlayStation Portal, a streaming-only handheld, and aims to compete with Nintendo's dominant Switch console and potential Microsoft offerings in the portable gaming space.
PSP returns? (Score:2)
Valuable point (Score:2)
Handhelds are like Keurig for coffee (Score:1)
They're saying it could be a few years away (I've read 2027 in a couple places), and that they still may never release it. With that level of commitment, they might want to save their time and money, and just not bother with a handheld. There are some great handhelds in the market already, so they'd need to have a game changing system (or be first to market with new tech) to make a dent in the market.
There's Nintendo and there's everyone else. And the switch only plays PS3/XBox360 games...which were released almost 20 years ago. Nintendo has great 1st party games, but the graphics suck on everything else and you have to play really compromised games. I don't even bother. I love the idea, but I get so little time to play games these days with small kids, I just wait until I can sit at a big TV with good graphics if I want to play a shooter, RPG, or modern game. Nintendo switch games are like Keurig
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If Sony could pull of a PS5 in a handheld, I'd be the first to buy it. I want something I can take on flights that won't suck for grown up games.
Law of thermodynamics gets in the way. With current processes you're not going to get a handheld console that is as powerful as a best of set-top consoles. This is why Steam deck and others are not as good as a laptop or desktop. Looking at broader categories, an iPad represents one of the better performing devices at that size. And there are compromises when compared to say a MacBook. Hard to dissipate heat when you're small, and hard to fit a big battery in a small place.
I think Nintendo has a huge advant
Why not just a PC storefront? (Score:2)
I'll never understand why the console makers - Nintendo and SONY in particular - don't just release PC store fronts. The demand for their content on that platform has been made crystal clear. They already have a store front cloud infrastructure. Its like their executives just don't understand how PCs work. Nintendo goes around pissing money away by suing everyone, and Sony gives their profit margins to others by listing their games on their store fronts. The PC (which includes Windows, mac, Linux, Steam OS)
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(I'd have edited this in, but no edit button...) - AND with Sony, they already have x86 binaries - they could conceivable build a PS4/PS5 execution engine (a hypervisor or container tech, or whatever), to run PS4 and PS5 games without even any effort from their vendors. I mean heck, they could do the same for PS1/2/3 through emulation as well if they really wanted. It makes no sense to me to just leave that potential money on the table.
Origin (or whatever EA calls it now) was always dead in the water becaus
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I'll never understand why the console makers - Nintendo and SONY in particular - don't just release PC store fronts. The demand for their content on that platform has been made crystal clear. They already have a store front cloud infrastructure. Its like their executives just don't understand how PCs work. Nintendo goes around pissing money away by suing everyone, and Sony gives their profit margins to others by listing their games on their store fronts. The PC (which includes Windows, mac, Linux, Steam OS) is an open platform - why voluntarily forfeit that profit? I guess their platform lock-in logic has twisted their minds or something.
Just release the PlayStation Storefront on PC. Just release Nintendo eShop on PC. They'd get to keep their 30%, and could even allow others to list their games, and keep their cloud rent. It's baffling to me that neither Sony nor Nintendo can figure that out. Maybe they think its anathema to what they actually want, which is lock-in? That's mostly an illusion, but also, this is still platform lock-in, it just isn't hardware lock-in. It's actually better lock-in because it's cloud lock-in, which is far more valuable. It's baffling to me. Just give people what they want and make it easy, and they'll pay for it.
Because they make money on the hardware sales, not to mention: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." They have been following the same business model for 40 years, and with a few exceptions (Wii U, Virtual Boy) it has served them very, very well. If they sold games on the PC, they might sell more software, but they would sell less hardware.
Or it will be huge.. (Score:2)
Or it will not run PS5 games natively.
Mobile memory speed is a massive hard cap on performance of portable consoles in general, with the pretty huge steam deck having a bandwidth of 88GB/s
That's very paltry if compared to the 448 GB/s the PS5 has.
Even the nintendo switch is primarily bottlenecked by it's memory speed.