PS5 Handheld Device in the Works at Sony, New Report Claims

Update: Dev apparently started after PS Portal launch

by · Push Square

Update [Mon 25th Nov 2024, 3:45pm]: Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson says Sony started work on a PS5 handheld shortly after the release of the PS Portal, which exceeded expectations.

This information is pertinent, because Henderson himself leaked the existence of the Remote Play handheld long before it was officially announced. It’s safe to assume he has some kind of insight on Sony’s plans then.

Obviously, there’s quite a lot of smoke to this fire now. Of course, just because PlayStation is exploring the possibility of a PS5 handheld, it doesn’t mean the product will officially make it to market. But it’s clear this is something that’s very much happening internally right now.

Original Story: Sony is currently in the "early stages of developing" an all-new handheld PlayStation device that would allow users to play PS5 games on the go, a report from Bloomberg claims. Sources speaking to the outlet under anonymity said the device is "likely years away" from release and warned it may never actually make "it to market".

Working a lot like a Steam Deck, such a device would let you download and natively play PS5 titles, either from a library tied to your existing PSN account or one you set up for the handheld system itself as a potential new customer. This would mark a change in approach from Sony when it comes to portable devices, as its previous efforts the PSP and PS Vita both had their own libraries of games designed specially for the consoles.

The recent PS Portal device saw the firm return to the space in a sense, but it didn't go all the way, instead letting buyers stream their games over the internet rather than downloading them. This rumoured console would fulfil the latter. "The product is aimed at expanding Sony’s reach and contending with Nintendo for the portable gaming market, according to people familiar with its development," said Bloomberg.

Over the weekend, we ran a Push Square Poll asking whether you would be interested in such a device. Over 50 per cent of responders said they would "absolutely" be interested, with just 10 per cent suggesting disinterest. It now sounds like there's a good chance of such a device becoming a reality. Microsoft is also creating handheld prototypes for the Xbox brand, so the space may be about to grow significantly in the coming years.

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Talking Point Would You Want a Steam Deck-Like Portable PlayStation?

All hands on deck

[source bloomberg.com]

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About Liam Croft

Liam grew up with a PlayStation controller in his hands and a love for Metal Gear Solid. Nowadays, he's found playing the latest and greatest PS5 games as well as supporting Derby County. That last detail is his downfall.

Comments 58

Yeah, continue what PS Portal is doing, but usable without internet connection. "Take Playstation with you wherever you go"

I would be so down for this I absolutely adored the PSP it was my world back in highschool/collage and the Vita god bless it's soul had huuuuge potential unfortunately they screwed it with those stupidly expensive memory cards and didn't support it enough. They could really help themselves back home in Japan with a dedicated handheld that's for sure

@REALAIS Exactly. Offline running games is the most important feature it must contain. That is why I bought Switch, to play my games regardless internet access. And that is also why I'm avoiding PS Portal, because I have no usage for it.

Ah yes, the famous Nintendo exists in their own space and isn't our direct competition is now "Oh, 147m in 7 years? Let's be having some of that".

I actually really liked the Vita. Still play it to this day, but I have to say the addition of a handheld that can play any game from your collection natively really appeals to me, especially as a predominantly digital collector of games.

The Laws of physics are undefeated. It’s simply not possible to create current gen performance in a handheld due to power and heat dissipation.

The technology to do that for PS5 games is a long way off. By the time it exists, you will be playing PS7 games via streaming on a cheaper and lighter Portal successor.

Same reason I don’t want a mobile device that can play PS4 games natively, as my Portal is far better.

And what about people that have physical media? There is no way Sony will let me download the digital version of a game I own physically.

PlayStation Portal is a great device on its own, and I'm glad Sony is entering the handheld market again and we're getting a native one.

As someone who was one of the few kids who owned a PS Vita at the time, I'm so happy with this news!

Good, competition drives the market forward.

I hope Sony will get some more competition on the higher specs market. They’ve become arrogant and have developed anti-consumer practices. And their CFO is ‘addicted to growth’, as he says.

Well I hope they use standard media rather then their own propriety ones this time (See M2 vs MicroSD).
And lets have PSP levels of support at least, rather then Vita levels.

Still have my Vita, it's a little slow but still got a lovely screen and some real gems.

Feels like something that would launch alongside the PS6.

Portal has laid down the foundations for success. (Although I would argue Switch has actually done most of that work and Sony are late to the party).

@Futureshark I doubt they will do physical media for a handheld now.

I'm also curious whether Sony will be able to support 2 systems this time. They forgot the Vita existed pretty quickly. And they have also mostly forgotten about the PSVR2 it seems.

If a Sony handheld releases I will hold off for at least a year to see where they plan to go with it.

@ChimpMasta not with current chips, but as processor nodes shrink you get more operations per second for less power, although concentrated into a smaller area, which is why newer handhelds are starting to have more complicated cooling systems. I would be unsurprised if by the time the PS6 rolls around you can get a handheld PS5.

@Friendly if it runs ps5 games straight from the library, it won't need as much support as a system with completely different games I suppose.

I can see Sony going down the "PS Deck" route, whereby you are playing native PS5 (or whatever) games on the system locally, with the game scaling to meet the resolution etc of the handheld.

I still like the idea of having an SSD in a case that can attach to the existing Portal so you can have a few games stored locally, but that will probably never happen (I also mentioned this in the Talking Point article, so will shut up about this now).

@Friendly if they make a portable PS5, the goal will probably to let you play your digital PS4/PS5 games that you own on your account.

I dont expect it to have its own library like the psp or vita had.

@theheadofabroom why would you want to play PS5 games then? Not that it will happen, but if it did, why? It’s old hat at that point.

The success of Switch and Portal is down to the fact that people can play the absolute latest games for those systems, whilst in bed/toilet etc.

It’s essentially zero compromise handheld gaming, aside from an “on-paper” resolution drop, which isn’t noticeable and could even be a higher pixel density due to the smaller screen.

Why compromise by going back to old fashioned native processing, which will always lead to out of date graphics, heavier weight, shorter battery life and more heat and fan noise?

Streaming may not replace home consoles for a while, but having tested the latest Portal update, it’s clear that handhelds with native processing are done.

Noting faster internet and mesh networks will be the norm for everyone before long. Those running 5mb connections on a 15 year old ISP router with a range of 10m are a dying minority with dwindling commercial influence. Same reason Sony are very bold about Digital games and selling drives as optional extras.

@Haruki_NLI I don't think they looked at Nintendo for this, I think they saw higher specs handheld like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally and thought that would be a good idea, like, play your PlayStation library on the go same as the Steam Deck.

I love me some handhelds, and have a Switch, PS Portal, Steam Deck, ROG Ally and a zillion other smaller ones. So I'm all in but there is a bit of a problem with the direction for Sony and big AAA players. There is always going to be a contention between performance and battery life/size in a handheld world. At the moment, Sony's big thing is to champion top tier graphics and push for devs to support PS5 Pro etc. This will then be the opposite side - also making devs support a lower grade system. Unless they just go for a PS4 era device. So I think its cool and I'd be down but is it too late after going for the top end performance piece of the pie?

I have my doubts about this. It'll be really expensive or disappointing, or both. And Sony have shown how bad they are at supporting multiple platforms many times. They've kind of struggled with just supporting the PS5 so far this gen.

The portal already seems like a perfect way forward with handheld gaming for Sony.

@Friendly Sony isn’t a charitable organization. They are for profit. Like all for profit hobby vanity companies, shareholders appreciate it when consumers continually buy into their ecosystem. No one is forcing us to be gamers. Personally id save the anti-consumer tag for later. As these companies really want everything to be internet of everything with subscriptions and no ownership. No that really messes up the consumers.

@ChimpMasta half of all PlayStation players are still on the PS4. The Steam Deck is really old hardware as is the Nintendo Switch. People still want to play games that aren't on the cutting edge and a lot of people are happy to pay a premium to play them on the move without needing a connection to their home console or a cloud gaming service.

I could see it being fairly popular if you have one device that plays all the games from the past two generations, as well as emulated PS1&2 games, as well as being a great way to remote play games from the new generation. It's likely that the PS5 will have an even longer tail than the PS4, so I can't see there being many games you can play on the the PS6 that aren't also playable on the PS5, and of those I can't see them being games you'd want to play on a handheld anyway.

@Czar_Khastik I heard that they’re working on a disc drive that you strap on your body like a fanny pack. It’s $100 and already sold out. 😜

It'll flop. It won't have the support needed to fight against the Switch 2 or 3, Steam Deck 2 or 3, Lenovo Asus and other make handhelds. And Microsoft as they are releasing their own handheld too.

@Czar_Khastik I'm sorry mate, I know I've perhaps said something along these lines to you once before, but... if you keep being so sincere and sensible, I'm going to have to report you.... 😉

@djlard the switch has real physical media. Something that I hope the switch 2 has. A switch is the best handheld device IMO because one doesn’t need an internet connection down the line when one has an urge to play a game they bought physically.

Remember vita was a failure so we need to call This a psp successor

Companies do R/D projects all of the time so that they can be competitive. If Xbox seriously launched a handheld before Sony, Sony wouldn’t want to miss out. As Sony is a hardware company at its core. This could be a niche product for Sony just like the Pro. Assuming they can make a profitable SOC that can appease the fans multiple high demands. Developers already complain about the series s and x SOCs. They will complain even more if Sony has three. As the console developers haven’t optimized their workflows.

@Friendly Wouldn't it be a good thing for a business to grow? Are you suggesting they become stagnant?

Sound promising but i hope they not abandoned it after 1 year lol. Seriously interested but im a bit skeptical.

But can it run Concord?

That’s going to be my reply to every one of these “PlayStation is making a new handheld device” articles, just so you know. 😎

If real, this has me concerned about PS6's ability to play physical media. The clearest messaging regarding being able to have games run on both PS6 and the handheld would be to completely get rid of the disc drive.

Let see how it goes.both psp and psvita was and still is a amazing console.word up son

@Czar_Khastik You'd need a handheld with a disc drive on the back. Hmmm, reminds me of something....

@ChimpMasta They still make PS4 versions of games. So I'm guessing that when we reach the PS6 era, there will still be PS5 versions of games? Bought digitally, you could possibly have access to both versions in your library? Paired with storing your save games in the Cloud, you could continue your game on the go?

@ChimpMasta "It’s simply not possible to create current gen performance in a handheld due to power and heat dissipation."

You can currently play PC versions of Forbidden West, Black Myth, Ragnarok and many more on Steam Deck. Those are current gen games running natively on a portable, why can't Sony do something similar with their portable?

They keep churning out hardware and forgetting that games are a pretty important component.

@Vaako007 New PS handheld MUST have some sort of physical medium to be successful.

@theheadofabroom The Steam Deck is really old hardware lol.

It's two years old, and runs all current games just fine.

@Futureshark I'm fairly confident that this is going to be a digital-only machine.

@Juanalf Because Sony has trained their consumers to expect the premium, best performance out of their hardware. It's why the budgets keep ballooning and costs keep going up.

So running games natively on a handheld would either require some rather expensive hardware to run cool and battery efficient to get equivalent PS5 performance at an even remotely reasonable price, or battery tech needs to advance like mad to accommodate that power draw.

The PS5 Pro is a more capable and slightly more power efficient machine than the PS5, but that's still a wall bound power guzzling beast. Shrinking that down without sacrificing performance (and this requiring developers to create ANOTHER performance profile for a handheld) while lasting a decent time isn't easy.

I mean, this is the company that has batteries larger than the Switch Pro Controller in their controllers, but they last a quarter of the time.

Plus, Steam Deck benefits from using existing Steam builds of games, with a range of often intricate scalability on the user end to accommodate the Deck's far lower power profile than most PCs. Plus Valve made a comparability layer to ease the transition.

Sony would need to ensure this prospective device is on the same architecture as PS5, affordable, power efficient, without making developers consider yet another spec sheet to target. Again, PC games already let users turn things on and off to suit a wide range of builds. PS5 builds are built for the PS5 with a toggle for graphics or performance.

Hallelujah!

I wanted to love the Portal, but I can’t handle streaming. This will be a day one purchase for me (as long as I can beat the scalpers).

@Juanalf you can “play” them on a Steam Deck, just as you can play them on a PS4. Only it’s heavily compromised.

After all, you don’t play them on a PS4 do you? Because you would rather play them on PS5.

If you own a Pro, you can sit on the toilet now with a Portal, and play games with higher detail settings and better frame rates than someone sat on a base PS5 in their living room.

It’s not compromised. The majority would rather play hand held games with PS6 quality via streaming, than sub-PS5 graphics natively.

When did you last play your Switch at the skate park or basket ball court?

Never. Doesn’t happen. Marketing twaddle. No compromise is required, you are rarely outside a WiFi network.

@Fishnpeas the Steam Deck as a product isn't that old, but the Aerith APU it runs on is a Zen 2 chip, which is a 5 year old architecture. Zen 3 had been out for 2 years when it released and Zen 4 released before the Steam Deck had reached most of the world. There's certainly a lot of new games people consider "unplayable" on the Deck. The PS5 is also Zen 2 but is much larger with a vastly largest power budget etc, meaning it can perform much better through brute force. This is evident when you contrast the Deck's 1-1.6TF of GPU throughput to the PS5's 10TF - it's not apples to apples but it certainly shows the order of magnitude difference in performance, despite the smaller console releasing 2 years more recently.

A pipe dream that most wouldn’t want but…

Would be awesome to launch with a wireless PSVR2. Make an enthusiasts version that could connect to the HMD and either tether to the handheld or stream.

Again… this is wishful thinking and I’m likely a
minority with these wishes haha.

I'd love for this to happen but I just can't see them make it viable price-wise. Even with the help of PSSR I feel like the price of entry will make it unpopular for a mainstream audience. IMO the way the portal is developing feels like the way to go.

@theheadofabroom what you're not taking into account is the system isn't outputting to 4k, no handheld needs that..

this would have to be a all digital device would it not?

Well apparently it is a PS6 companion device not PS5. I'm curious to see how it handles local play. PSSR heavily involved perhaps

@lui709 I reckon £249 should be the price point and if it can play online streaming, remote play with PS4, PS5 & PS6, 480p-720p upscaled to 1080p for local games then it'll be better than a Switch.

But obviously it won't do that because if it did then PS6 would have serious competition from its sibling

@Haruki_NLI You seem to be overlooking the fact that a handheld would be like a 720p or 1080p screen. I'm no pixel mathematician but I believe running a game at 1080p requires only about 40% of the power as running at native 4k.

Then there is upscalling, sony already has their own tech that right out of the gates was far superior to FSR and pushing close to the best in class DLSS. Theres no reason that they couldn't be running PS5 games at a really low resolution and upscalling to 1080p.

The biggest problem is that games would probably require a manual patch as doing that from Sonys end and forcing games into the target resolution is extremely unlikely I believe

Before wasting everyones time, please ask ONE questions on EVERY design choice .. "IS THIS WHAT THE CONSUMER WANTS?" Vita would've had a very different outcome if Sony had asked ... "does the consumer want overpriced, proprietary mem cards" or "does the consumer want to purchase extra buttons to make remote play (a heavily advertised feature) usable.

@ChrisDeku Well the good news is more and more games are shipping at less than 1080p and being upscaled up lmao

I can see how they would match PS5's GPU power by simply running the games at a low ~800p resolution. But it's just not possible to match PS5's CPU on a handheld, and there's no easy way to automatically scale it down.

The only path I see is to require explicit support from devs. It's not exactly the same as the Vita, which required a separate SKU, but something more along the lines of the PS5 Pro (although in the reverse direction).

@Fishnpeas that helps, but it still doesn't make up for an order of magnitude difference in processing power

@LogicStrikesAgain there's growth, and there's milking. There's a reason Sony's been focusing on live service games, price hikes, golden PS5's, shutting down studios and larger profits for shareholders ever since he became CFO. Not really working out now for the consumer, is it? Only 6,5% of last quarter's games sold on Playstation were 1st party because the offering hasn't been to what it used to be on PS4, PSVR2 has been forgotten, services have never been so expensive (absolute and relative), and we got a 700+ dollar console, relatively one of the most expensive playstations ever (2nd behind PS3).

Just my 2 cents though.

Yes, Sony’s a business. But hopefully the narrative will change a bit for the consumer’s better in upcoming years.

@Friendly First off, i get your frustration with some of Sonys decisions lately regarding live service, price hikes and studio closures. But i think we should step back and see the bigger picture.

When you say growth vs milking i think u mean natural growth and investment vs squeezing the money out of consumers right?

However Sonys push for live service doesn't seem like purely a way to maximize profits. Reality is, the ways of making games, especially triple A, have become unsustainable(for every studio and publisher), with costs of games getting so high. There are industry wide layoffs as the trends are pointing to ever increasing costs of development and much lower profit margins.

Its a bit more nuanced than Sony just wants more money. Having a successful live service title or two might actually be beneficial for consumers in the long run, at least if the consumer wants more of the triple A games that they are used to getting from Sony, as it may help fund these games. And since all of their competitors have one, i understand them in trying to get one for themselves.

The CFO didn't close the studios, this is a decision made by a whole group of people, he doesn't have the power to do that by himself.

Also closing studios isn't inherently evil, especially if its done for sustainability in the long run, considering these skyrocketed development costs. Studios that underperform and lose money cant simply be kept alive. Im not saying it sucks for the people btw, but it definitely makes sense business wise.

Prices all around have been rising, its called inflation, gaming isn't immune to it. $700 for a Pro even seems pretty reasonable when you look at the main competitor pricing their latest Xbox for $600. Prices aren't dictated in a vacuum, they have to consider what their competitors are doing. I know its a tough pill to swallow, but they're hardly the only ones raising prices in the industry.

And their service is also cheaper than their closest competitor, and considering the costs and global reach of their service, thats pretty good.

I dont think its fair to single out Sony when the whole industry has turned to live service and other ways of monetization.

Fact is, every other major publisher has been doing way more nefarious things like aggressive micro transactions in their games than Sony. Im not saying Sony is perfect, but other publishers have far more aggressive monetization tactics than Sony.

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