We have been reporting rumors that Sony is interested in returning to portable gaming for years. But this time, there’s not only sufficient reason to be excited, there’s a lot of reason to believe it.
Bloomberg’s Takashi Mochizuki reports that Sony is in the early stages of producing a new PlayStation console, that will run PlayStation 5 games. This product will definitely be years away from getting released, and Sony could still change their mind and cancel it.
As you may have guessed, Sony is looking to compete with Nintendo in the portable gaming front. But on top of that, this is also a move against their fiercer rival Microsoft. Earlier in the month, Microsoft Gaming head Phil Spencer officially confirmed that they are working on their own gaming handheld.
Of course, Sony has also tried to have a go at their own handheld gaming console. The PSP was a highlight of 2000s gaming and consumer tech in general. Not only did it play games, but Sony made a format to play movies, and they had ambitions for music and other media as well.
Most fans remember PSP as losing out to the sales race to the Nintendo DS. However, Sony lost an even broader war with the platform, as they were steps behind Apple’s iPod, as well as the digital media revolution that would make PSP’s UMD format obsolete. And yes, this all played out before the iPhone, Android, and iPads came to market.
Sony’s second round at portable gaming was the PlayStation Vita, with more power and more realistic goals as a gaming dedicated handheld. While the Vita seemed to promise the console experience on a handheld, it came out four years before Nvidia revealed they made a real mobile CPU capable of running console games with the Tegra X1.
So, the Vita had some games that looked like it could provide that experience, such as Killzone: Mercenary and Uncharted: Golden Abyss. But that illusion was broken when we saw the disappointing Vita ports of Borderlands 2 and Resident Evil: Revelations 2.
There were other reasons that Vita failed in the market as well, such as Sony suddenly having cold feet with first party support. But what’s really relevant now is that Nvidia’s innovation with the TegraX1 is why things could be different for Sony this time.
We talked a lot about the impossible Nintendo Switch ports around here. Many gamers now, who never played Borderlands 2 and Resident Evil: Revelations 2 on Vita, complain about the compromises made for games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Doom Eternal.
But the reason those ports were possible in the first place is that Nvidia was able to deliver on that mobile CPU powerful enough to run console games. Today, AMD and Intel have come forward with their own SOCs that run PC gaming handhelds. So, Sony and Microsoft have their pick of partners to make SOCs for their respective PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series gaming handhelds.
If there’s still some uncertainty around this, it’s because there are other things Sony and Microsoft could bring together for their handhelds. For example, if the European market rules about mobile stores go worldwide, they can make a gaming store that they can run on phones and tablets, and push the same store on their dedicated gaming handheld.
There’s also the unfortunate fact that current video game market conditions are unfavorable to taking risks. But a gaming console that can natively run PlayStation 5 games, as well as a comparable console that can run Xbox games across their generations, will definitely have a huge appeal to their dedicated fanbases who have amassed huge libraries of their games.
It would definitely be exciting if we could get handhelds like these in the future, but nothing is set in stone for now.
