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The most shocking thing here is that the PS Portal did well at all.
Good news in my book if that makes Sony make another handheld... It should be quite obvious that people aren't done with handhelds...
Even "tinier" games would be welcome as how the gaming industry is nowadays.
I see two unrelated articles that it hink address similar problems.
For handhelds, Sony is good at making hardware, but has generally failed to develop a good library of 1st party games. In order to be successful, a platform needs enough hardware sales to be an enticing platform for 3rd party developers, but you need a game library to drive hardware sales. That's where 1st party support comes in, and where Nintendo has generally been great with their handhelds. Sony tried to have a more even split, but ended up focusing on their home consoles when they were pushed.
The second is emulation. Sony has a significant library of old games, and even more if you count 3rd party titles for Sony's old consoles. Really popular games often merit full re-makes. Slightly less popular games get re-released or remastered, sometimes in collections. A lot of games aren't popular enough for that, but if you could find a way to charge people anywhere from $1-$10 to play through the original version it would probably sell (and having a platform the 3rd party publishers to also sell their old PlayStation Roms would probably let Sony take a % for almost no additional work). The problem is... The Shadow of the Colossus remake released for $40 initially and is still $20 initially today. If we were able to pay $5 or $10 for the PS2 version back in 2018, would the remake have even been possible?
Beyond that, does would a greater emphasis on releasing older games on emulators possibly cannibalize new game sales? Are there going to be people who, when GTA 6 releases for $70+micro transactions, would eye up Vice City or San Andreas for $5 or $10 and no micro transactions instead?
I think they could address both issues with a retro handheld. Cheap Chinese retro handhelds have been really popular the past few years- imagine one with the build quality, controls, support, legitimacy, and increased price tag of being from Sony? If it could play PS1, PS2, And PSP games that a gigantic library available that's mostly sitting idle right now. You could probably get by with a 480p screen too, although if Sony wanted a more premium feel 720p would still be fine. I'm also not sure if they would go 4:3, or expand to 16:9 to allow for the games that did support widescreen to use it, and for the PSP. Vita and PS3 would be cool, but I'll assume they aren't realistic for now.
From my experience with the Steam Deck- having dedicated extra buttons for save states and fast forward/slow down/pause/rewind breathes tons of new life into old games. Not enough check points? Really long unskippabke cutscenes or load times? The classic "unskippabke cutscenes before a long and challenging boss fight that makes you rewatch the cutscene every time you die"? All solved with save states and fast forwarding. It also helps with these games being designed for longer play sessions than would be typical for a handheld.
What I'm not certain of is- would this be differentiated enough to not cannibalize any new game sales? I suspect confining it to a separate, handheld platform would help to make it make sense. Maybe the dark horse candidate is Sony releasing a PC app on Steam as well, but I think cannibalization would be a different concern there.
For handhelds, Sony is good at making hardware, but has generally failed to develop a good library of 1st party games. In order to be successful, a platform needs enough hardware sales to be an enticing platform for 3rd party developers, but you need a game library to drive hardware sales. That's where 1st party support comes in, and where Nintendo has generally been great with their handhelds. Sony tried to have a more even split, but ended up focusing on their home consoles when they were pushed.
Put a PS4 in the portal package. You can make that work at a $350-400 price point with a newer process node. Call it a PS4P or something, support the already existing library, and you will get plenty of new sales and plenty of incentives for devs to target the system for less demanding games, because it still has a huge install base.
That might work, but I'm not sure all of the tradeoffs would line up there.
At $350-$400 you're competing with the Steam Deck. I think that's asking for failure. Sony might allow Linux on it (like the PS2 and PS3), but I would expect the main gaming OS to be fairly locked down with DRM. The Deck is a couple years old so maybe they could beat them on price/performance/battery life, but not by a huge amount of we are talking about the power to play PS4 games. They would have a miniscule fraction of the library, and probably not the track pads and key software to allow the Deck to play M&KB games.
And then there is the Switch. The regular version is $270, the OLED is $330. Huge install library already. Plus you get the versatility of handheld and home use, plus the JoyCons (which there would be legal hurdles to try to copy). And the Switch 2 is right around the corner. I would bet (and I think Sony would too) that the Switch 2 is going to be a similar price and competitive performance/battery life. I don't think you're proposing would compete.
And you'd still have the problem of splitting the dev base. I could be wrong, but I thought Sony announced they are no longer publishing for the PS4 (the last game would have been Lost Soul, but the PS4 version was canceled so the last game they published was MLB 2023) and expect 3rd parties to end in 2025. Heck, a PS5 Pro has been rumored for a while now. So it seems Sony is trying to get away from PS4 development.
Don't get me wrong- I like your idea. But i think something like that would be a sudden reversal of the direction Sony has been signalling they want to go for a few years now.
They're a console, and the one that's winning comfortably. Steam deck, as well as it's managed to minimize the friction, still has a lot more that Sony just tweaking PS4's OS a little, and it wouldn't have the multiplayer issues Linux does out of the box.
The switch is limited on what games can go on it by the bad CPU, and we haven't seen any real indication that Nvidia is going to be able to do better on the next one.
People are buying just the streaming handheld at a pretty decent rate for $200. Doubling that to play their entire PS4 library and still be able to stream PS5 games is a no brainer. They'd get the volume for all the same reasons PS is popular to begin with.
I don't think they'll do it, but I'll stand by my assertion that it's what the PS Portal should have been. Streaming isn't good enough to justify the price tag, even as premium as the actual device feels. I think most people willing to spend $200 for a dumb streaming handheld would have been willing to double it to natively play a lot of their games. That's not a budget conscious purchases.
Sony is garbage. Ain't buying any more of their shit. I've known this since the 2011 hack as they've made endless idiotic decisions and got by with popularity of first party titles like Nintendo does, but I slowly got to the point that Steam is more than sufficient with Steam Link and Steam Deck.
The Portal was abysmally stupid for so many reasons. They never could just code an efficient remote play app. Why would you pay them money for a useless brick they put it on?
A. I agree it's a dumb buy, especially because streaming sucks.
B. They do have a remote play app already. It works perfectly fine for what remote play is, is on Mac/Windows in addition to mobile, and there's a third party option for Linux.
C. The portal feels fucking fantastic. And fully supports the trigger/controller stuff, according to my friend who bought it.
Would I be way more interested in a handheld PS4 in the same package? Absolutely. But if you consider what it is as something compelling, they put it in a damn nice package.