A new rumor has emerged that Sony is interested in going round three in the dedicated handheld gaming industry.
As shared on reddit by user Nova_, YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead claims that Sony is at the early stages of developing a new portable PlayStation. They have personally dubbed the device the Vita 2, but marking it that way could be hexing its chances of success, so we won’t call it that.
Moore’s Law is Dead shared these on-screen notes about the device:
- Custom AMD APU, currently in the high level design phase (at least 2 years out, and technically not fully greenlit for launch yet)
- Developers I speak with state that it is plausible the “Vita 2” could utilize 18 CUs to maintain native BWC with all PS4 digital titles, and then for PS5 games a “Pro-like Patch” could be applied after a bit of work and testing from participating devs.
- Because of the PS5’s variable clock speeds, it’s also plausible the GPU could run at 1.8GHz or slower too. To be clear, this wouldn’t work for all games, it would require per-game testing & patches, and games would run at much lower resolutions.
- It has alternatively been suggested to me that the “Vita 2” is in fact a “PlayStation 6 family” handheld meant to launch many years from now with the next generation PS6 as a weaker (but portable) alternative for the Japanese market.
- To be clear – what I can 100% confirm is that there is a new PlayStation Handheld in early development, and that AMD has already gotten the contract for the PlayStation 6. The exact specs and details of the PS6 and “Vita 2” are speculation by me.
We can’t comment on whether the rumor sounds credible or not, but it’s a very interesting time for Sony to be exploring this.
As we know, PlayStation Portable was a fair success, even in the face of the groundbreaking Nintendo DS. In contrast, both the PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS failed to live up to their predecessors, with the Vita taking on a Wii U-like stigma.
Vita’s reputation was marred not only by its low sales success, but its weak hardware. Now, the Vita and Wii U were cursed by coming too early, before manufacturers like AMD and Nvidia developed mobile chips that could match PCs and game consoles. Vita users felt that pain firsthand when they played the disappointing ports of Borderlands 2 and Resident Evil Revelations 2 on the platform.
We reported on Nvidia showing off that mobile CPU that could run Unreal all the way back in 2013. That technology made their way onto the Nintendo Switch, and that in turn kickstarted a revolution and market for hybrid portable/home console gaming platforms. Switch’s success enabled early birds like GPD to make the first Windows gaming handhelds, and Valve to return to hardware with the Steam Deck, and now an emerging market for these devices with Windows OEMs.
So Sony would be entering this market at a time when there is a captive audience that would buy their devices, and plentiful supply for parts to make manufacturing cheaper for them. On the other hand, Sony would be facing a completely different competitive market.
It was one thing to face the portable gaming giant that was Nintendo. It’s something else to now have to sell your device when Valve and all these Windows OEMs are selling consumers on just playing their PC libraries on games built for them. Nintendo has their incredibly successful first party IP library to compete gainfully in this market. Does Sony have a winning strategy to be successful as well?
Sony won’t be able to sell their device on indies, and they aren’t as likely to be successful on 3rd party licenses as before. Sony can theoretically sell the device on their own first party titles, but it seems the feasibility of those products is called into question.
Before we go any further, obviously the rumor itself claims Sony is at the initial phases of developing this product. So they are likely looking into these issues right now. They may make final decisions based on how they view the market, including the fact that they did sell fans on the PlayStation Portal and the pending release of Nintendo’s next platform. That could mean major changes on how they do portable gaming, or it could mean they eventually change their minds and cancel this. But it’s certainly interesting that Sony is seriously considering this at all.
