It’s always nice to spice up a summer console launch with a little hardware reveal, but the unveiling of Sony’s Project Q handheld at Wednesday’s PlayStation Showcase was one of the more eye-catching ones.
Project Q is a device with an 8-inch screen that lets you play PlayStation 5 games with Sony’s Remote Play system and stream them from your PS5 over WiFi “when you’re away from your TV,” like it says in the press to release. It looks like a DualSense controller cut in half and attached to either end of a Switch’s midsection.
Here’s what it’s not: a true handheld console or cloud gaming device. Games run locally on your PS5 and without a cellular connection, Project Q won’t work on the go, unless the plane or train you’re on happens to have an ultra-robust WiFi connection, or you invest in a 5G hub in one good network. (Sony says using Project Q requires “at least 5 Mbps” for “a better gaming experience” at least 15 Mbps.) The games also need to be installed on the PS5, which means using Project Q with Cloud -Gaming excludes service that is part of Sony’s PlayStation Plus subscription offering.
In essence, Project Q is about giving you access to your PS5 games anywhere in the house – whether you’re on the TV or when you’re in bed. Or it could potentially work well if you’re staying with family or vacationing in an Airbnb.
That’s exactly what Remote Play is doing – and has been for a very long time. The feature was introduced back in 2006 with the PlayStation 3 and initially only worked with the PlayStation Portable and later with the Vita handheld. Over time, support expanded to other Sony devices, then to Windows and Mac PCs, and finally in 2019 to Android and iOS mobile devices. Setting it up on a laptop, phone or iPad coupled with a PlayStation controller isn’t too difficult and can be very handy. But it has never been so widespread.
So the questions are: What does Project Q bring? And now, 17 years later, why is Sony investing in Remote Play with a dedicated device?
The appeal of a dedicated device is easy to understand: the form factor of a handheld console is more comfortable than a separate controller and small screen in most situations. Project Q offers that convenience, and as an official PlayStation disposable device, it should work smoother than any other Remote Play solution. (You can get Remote Play to work on a Steam deck, but it takes some fiddling.) Unlike third-party devices or controllers, it offers all the features of the DualSense, including its adaptive triggers and subtle haptic feedback. The screen’s 1080p resolution will certainly be enough for its size, although an OLED panel like the top-of-the-line Switch would have been better than the LCD offered by Sony.
The point of Project Q is probably that it offers the ideal no-compromise remote play solution around the home with the greatest possible ease of use. But it doesn’t offer more than that, duplicating the work that other devices you already own can do. There’s even an officially licensed PlayStation version of the Backbone mobile game controller, and an Android version of it got introduced the day before Project Q was. It might not have the DualSense capabilities, but it does have the benefit of potentially making remote play truly portable, as long as your cellular data plan and service can handle the data needs.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Project Q is that Sony isn’t extending its capabil ities to streaming games from the cloud, so it could work independently of a PS5. Cloud streaming doesn’t require a lot of processing power – just connectivity and a video decoder, which Project Q should theoretically already have. Maybe Sony couldn’t get it to work well enough at the cost – but then again, it might have been worth investing a little more and risking a higher price point to increase the device’s utility and future-proof it.
The existence of Project Q suggests that Sony is aware of the need for games to better fit into people’s lives. to be more flexible and less tied to a large electronic building block under the desk or TV. The tremendous success of Nintendo’s Switch is proof of that, and Microsoft and others anticipate that desire will lead to gaming eventually following other entertainment media into the cloud-streaming space.
In fact, Sony was an early investor in cloud gaming technology. It bought the Gaikai platform for $380 million in 2012 to build the PlayStation Now service, but never seemed to know what to do with it. The fact is, the cloud doesn’t align well with Sony’s business model, culture, or values. Sony is an entertainment industry giant built on the back of an old-fashioned consumer electronics manufacturer, and many of those in power there are either engineers who build excellent machines or marketers (like PlayStation boss Jim Ryan) who build excellent machines in boxes and buy them And sell.
Now the engineers have to make another device and the marketers have to sell another box. But there isn’t much in the box. To make the benefits of remote play more accessible and marketable, Project Q makes sense at a niche level. But in response to gaming’s rapidly changing future, it’s more than a little backwards.
