Sony in “early stages” of making a hand held PS5

thesixthaxis.com:

Bloomberg are reporting that Sony are in the early stages of developing a portable console that will play PlayStation 5 games without streaming. According to the report that was the original plan for the PlayStation Portal, making it a direct competitor to Valve’s SteamDeck, but it was shelved in favour of the streaming only device.

Sony have had some success with hand held devices in to the past but has never managed to compete with Nintendo’s hand held offerings. The big question here is does anyone want a PS5 Portable? It’s going to be expensive, no doubt there, and they would be going up against mobile phone gaming. Nintendo’s Switch is portable but I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw someone using one on the commute to work,  it is a big bulky device and for short trips everyone seems quite happy with a round of two of Candy Crush.

The device is said to be years away from release but many factors are in play and it may never become a real product.

A hand held PS5 does seem to be a very niche product but that does appear to be something Sony want to pursue, the PlayStation Portal and the PS5 Pro being current examples of that strategy.

Sony recently announced that the PlayStation Portal will begin beta tests of streaming games from the PlayStation Plus catalogue, rather from the users own PS5.

Sony’s last hand held device, the PS Vita, started strongly but support for it soon dropped off.  Many of Sony’s key franchises had their own unique games on the console including Uncharted, Wipeout, Resistance Fall of Man, and Killzone, and while most of these were impressive the console also had some terrible exclusives, the PS Vita version of Call of Duty Black Ops was a universally derided. As the years rolled on many previously announced games such as Bioshock were quietly cancelled.

Would you buy a hand held PS5 and more importantly, how much are you willing to pay? Let us know in the comments.

Source: Bloomberg (Paywall)