The last couple of years have demonstrated something that was once thought impossible: Yes, gamers do want a high-end portable machine that doesn’t say “Nintendo” on the front. The Steam Deck and its many imitators have blown open the market for portable PC gaming, and it’s bringing in some new competition.
According to a new rumor, we might be seeing a familiar face in the gaming handheld arena. That face is Sony.
Bloomberg says that Sony is seriously looking into a portable gaming machine for the first time since the PlayStation Vita more than a decade ago. What’s more, this wouldn’t be a phone derivative or a streaming-only device, like the currently active PlayStation Portal (pictured above). Rather, the rumor says that this would be a full-on PlayStation 5 that you can throw in a bag or hook up to a TV, a la the dual functionality of the Nintendo Switch. Or the Steam Deck, for that matter.
Details are scarce, but the development is allegedly coming out of the same process that resulted in the somewhat disappointing PlayStation Portal, which was recently updated to allow streaming from Sony’s cloud-based service. The Portal isn’t anywhere near powerful enough to run PS5 games natively… but the PS5 is now over five years old, and it uses a custom RDNA2 graphics system.
While the hardware is extremely bespoke, it has a lot in common with the AMD RDNA2 chips in the Steam Deck and many alternatives. It’s not hard to imagine Sony looking over the fence at Valve’s success and wondering if the portable gaming market is worth another try, especially since the $700 PlayStation 5 Pro has arrived as a bit of a flop. Making a portable PS5 could be a great way to extend the console’s shelf life and keep people invested in the platform.
Sony isn’t the only one looking at the portable gaming market with fresh eyes, by the way. Rumors of an Xbox handheld have been around for almost as long as the Xbox itself, but Microsoft recently commented that it’s been investigating the possibility more earnestly. That said, the company is still more interested in pursuing portable PC gaming with its hardware partners like Asus and Lenovo, at least for now.
No company has ever been able to mount a serious competitor to Nintendo’s portable gaming dominance since the original Game Boy in 1989. That includes the Steam Deck — while it’s an unqualified success in terms of the PC gaming market, it still sells a fraction of the units of Nintendo’s Switch, even after the latter has been around for seven years. But the Steam Deck is demonstrating that adults are willing to spend a little more for high-end gaming on the go, and that’s an opportunity for Sony to extend beyond the home console market.
Bloomberg is typically a reliable source for industry insider information, but none of this is confirmed. Consider it all rumor for the time being.