Before Thanksgiving, Bloomberg published a report that Sony has a portable gaming console “in early development. That console will reportedly be able to play PS5 games as well as the Nintendo Switch.
The future of gaming is handheld consoles and we have heard rumors that Sony is exploring a true handheld console.
Today, Digital Foundry released a video podcast confirming some of Bloomberg's reporting.
“What's interesting about this is that we actually heard specifically from several sources about this handheld a few months ago,” senior staff writer John Linneman said in the video. This confirms what we had seen and heard off the record about this handheld.
The trio discusses what they think handheld gaming consoles will feature, primarily expanding or shrinking the game based on form factor. In other words, the games may be slightly less graphic in the handheld version, but look and perform much better when docked or played on the main console.
They believe that at best a PS4 game might run natively on a handheld, but that Sony's way of making the PS5 would not allow a PS5 game to run that way on a handheld. Nevertheless, Valve's Steam Deck and competing products from Asus and Lenovo show that powerful, high-performance games are possible on portable devices.
Sony released PlayStation Portal earlier this year, a sort of streaming device that connects to the main console. However, this report seems to confirm a mobile console like the Switch or Valve Steam Deck.
A handheld console is in the works; Xbox's Phil Spencer recently confirmed that the company is also developing an Xbox handheld.
The PlayStation and Xbox handhelds are said to be several years away from launch, which is not surprising; the PlayStation 6 is not expected to be released until 2027 or 2028. So for both companies, there is time to design and develop a handheld that will probably work with whatever the next generation of games are.
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