It is estimated that the PlayStation Vita sold 16 million consoles. They may not seem like many, seeing the figures that current systems are considering, but we are talking about between two and three million more than Wii U having hit the shelves a little earlier. There are plenty of reasons not to have it in a drawer, for the record, but we are clear that that same console would have had a different role in PlayStation’s strategy if it had had sufficient support. Will we see another laptop from Sony again? The truth is There is room for that to happen.
The current situation of PlayStation is curious: there are currently more than 50 million PS5s sold in just over three years, but Luigi’s Mansion 3 (from Switch) eats away at the best games from its studios in sales. We also know, because it is official, that the most popular games are Call of Duty, Fortnite and EA’s sports sagas. And there are more and more portable systems from Valve, ROG, Lenovo or MSI that allow us to play them wherever we want and whenever we want.
What’s more, the most significant fact of all is that PlayStation Portal, the PS5 remote player, has been out of stock intermittently since before its launch. At the time of writing these lines we see that Amazon is full of accessories but the units come from third parties and above their price, and the same applies to El Corte Inglés or Fnac. If you want one (because we’ve looked at everything) there are limited units en PlayStation Direct. The reading we make is clear: Sony is interested in investigating giving it a successor to the PS Vita, and the water in the river has begun to sound.
Media that have proven to be reliable como Insider Gaming They have begun to echo that a new portable PlayStation console is being developed. And not only that: there have been really specific details about it as it will have a custom AMD processing unit, 18 CUs, a GPU of approximately 1.8 GHz and that will be able to run PS4 games natively and will enable PS5 titles by encouraging developers to update existing and upcoming games. Nothing is official, mind you, but on paper it doesn’t look bad. And in practice?
Why Sony is interested in releasing a new portable PlayStation
There is a fundamental reason why Sony is interested in releasing a portable console, and another at a strategic level. The first is not too mysterious: everything with the PlayStation logo sells very well. The brand is very well established and is recognizable throughout the world. Presenting compatible headphones is not the same as presenting officially licensed ones and your own, such as the PULSE 3D Wireless Headphones. And that is reflected in the price.
The second reason is more interesting for the PS5 player and user: currently PlayStation does not have Microsoft’s infrastructure, and while the Xbox company makes good friends with Valve and NVIDIA and updates its Windows operating system to adapt to any portable machine (opening the doors to Game Pass) we find that Sony has a very closed ecosystem and their cloud play is extremely limited.
And we cannot forget something as transcendental as trying to eat Nintendo Switch 2’s toast or, failing that, a slice of its cake.
If part of the launch of PlayStation Portal was to test the waters, or send a probe balloon, to see what reception a device for portable gaming had, the message received by Sony has been loud and clear. So much so that in Europe exceeded sales from other consoles… Without being a console.
The logical step in both situations is to shape and launch a new portable system. One that not only extends the value of the brand, even among those who already have the PS5, and that allows you to play the most popular games – your own or third-party games – from a PlayStation platform. Not through a remote playback system, but with autonomy and functions that were already present on PS Vita, but adapted to what current games demand.
Among other things, because the only alternative there is to playing PlayStation hits on a laptop is to wait for them to come to PC and take them to a Steam Deck. And in many of those cases, as we have already seen, it has encountered a problem: even in the case of its star sagas, these games had lost their moment of greatest popularity. Except, of course, those games designed to expand and evolve constantly. Something that Naughty Dog, one of its star studios, has no intention of doing.
PlayStation must not forget the fundamental thing: the games
40 minutes are enough to talk about many things, but we all assume that Sony kept its cards in its hand in the State of Play. For the first time in a long time, its digital event format did not serve to announce new hardware or accessories for PlayStation.
It is not that a State of Play is held every month, but throughout 2023 we have seen a review of the PS5, a remote playback system, a controller for accessibility, new thematic models of cases and controllers, headphones… and even PlayStation VR2. And this last one is really interesting: only two games were announced for their next-gen virtual reality.
That Sony releases a new laptop will be good news as long as it has clear priorities with it and its reason for being: what can be played from it and the flow of new content. From now on Two possibilities open up.
- Let it be about a portable alternative to PS5receiving some or all of your games through direct streaming or through cloud play, which would require a PlayStation Plus Premium plan.
- Which, like PlayStation VR2, receive your own games as happened with PS Vita. Which would force its own studies to develop initiatives for it. And that would mean not only a large investment, but also being more selective when it comes to producing games and spacing out the releases of PS5 and, in a few years, PS6.
As we mentioned at the beginning, the rumored compatibility with PS4 and PS5 will add substantial value to a hypothetical PlayStation laptop and will allow it to compete with what Nintendo, Valve or ROG have in their hands. Above all, with a Switch successor that is making a lot, a lot of noise without having been formally presented yet.
But in the end everything ends up returning to the starting point: nothing is announced, the possibility is being investigated and the open secret of the success of Switch lies in the games of the Big N, in the same way that the great appeal of the Steam Deck lies in the library that we import from PC.
So, although it is not at all unreasonable that we will see a new portable PlayStation sooner or later, Sony’s real challenge is organizing its priorities: offer new games capable of exciting. Not just good games, that too, but real console sellers. A challenge that they must take on internally, so as not to have to depend so much on Fortnite, Call of Duty or the alliance with Square Enix.
In iGamesNews | The hardware that 2023 leaves us: from PlayStation VR2 to the Atari Gamestation Pro
