Rumors are swirling that Sony has a new trick up its sleeve – a PlayStation 5 Portable that could shake up the gaming world. Bloomberg reports that the tech giant is secretly developing a handheld type of its mega popular PlayStation 5 console as part of its bid to capture a piece of the booming portable games market that Nintendo currently leads.
Details on the PlayStation 5 Portable — and it is plausible that’s what it is — are understandably scarce but insiders believe that it is all part of Sony’s intent to reach a broader audience in gaming and take on Nintendo’s lock on handheld gaming. The success has been huge for the Japanese company: its Switch console has sold almost 141 million units since launching in 2017, beating the lifetime sales of the PlayStation 4.
A New Frontier for Sony
This wouldn’t be Sony’s first foray into portable gaming. The company had earlier tapped the PSP (PlayStation Portable) line, which was officially discontinued in 2014 after a decade in the market. But building a handheld version of a powerhouse console like the PlayStation 5 is a very tricky technical feat.
The sources indicate that the PlayStation 5 Portable is still in the early stages of development, likely several years away from hitting store shelves. That’s in line with rumbling we’ve heard from Microsoft, which is supposed to be developing its own portable Xbox device to tag along with the third party handheld action.
Streaming Success
Sony’s already dipped its toes into the portable gaming game with its own dive, known as the PlayStation Portal, a portable device that plays games from your PlayStation 5. Last month, the company revealed that it would be upgrading the Portal to allow cloud gaming, so it wouldn’t always need to be plugged into a PlayStation 5 with some games.
On the other hand, Microsoft has gone down this same sort of path, launching a browser based cloud gaming service that lets Xbox games be streamed to any device you can imagine. While the heavyweight console makers are shellacking for territory in the streaming space, an all out ‘streaming war’ seems to be on the horizon.
The Future in Your Pocket
The onset of powerful — and portable — versions of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X would be a seismic shift in gaming. But shrinking something that size to handheld form isn’t easy, especially if you want to put something with some scalps on it in there, too.
By the time sony and microsoft figure out how to get new portable powerhouses out the door, theres a good chance the average smartphone will be capable of running games of current-gen consoles natively. With bite speed technology and chips on mobile devices becoming increasingly powerful more quickly than ever before, gaming’s future may be in our pockets.
Only time will tell if a PlayStation 5 Portable will materialize and if it can make a meaningful impact in an increasingly crowded and rapidly evolving gaming market. One thing is certain: Portable gaming supremacy is about to get a lot hotter.
