Sony has started work on a portable console capable of playing PlayStation 5 games, Bloomberg reports.
Citing anonymous sources familiar with the development of the device, Bloomberg said the new handheld was likely years away from launch, and that Sony could still decide to pull the plug on the project.
Sony is said to be considering the move in order to compete with Nintendo’s dominance in handheld consoles, and to head off competition from Xbox, which has indicated that it’s exploring the idea of a handheld. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer recently said that a potential portable Xbox was also a few years away.
In the past few years, Valve has opened up a new market for more expensive, more powerful, premium handheld gaming devices with the Steam Deck, which now has a number of competitors that also run PC games. This seems to have encouraged Microsoft and Sony to reconsider the handheld market, long thought to have been locked down by Nintendo after Sony’s attempts to challenge it with the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita ultimately fizzled out.
Meanwhile, Nintendo is set to replace the nearly eight-year-old Switch — the third-best-selling console of all time — with a successor device in the first half of 2025. Switch 2 is thought to be less powerful than PS5 and Xbox Series X, but capable of similar experiences thanks to AI-powered upscaling technology.
Sony has developed its own AI upscaler, dramatically named PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), which is employed in the new PlayStation 5 Pro console. This technology would likely play an essential role in developing a portable device capable of playing PS5 games.
For now, Sony offers the PlayStation Portal, a handheld device that can stream PS5 games either directly from the owner’s PS5 or using Sony’s cloud gaming service, offered as part of the PlayStation Plus subscription.
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