Sony’s New Handheld System. More Of A Peripheral For PS5 Than A New Console.
Sony has been heading the news recently and the portable console community since they’re planning on creating a new portable console to play games on, but there is a catch, it only streams games? This looks much more like Sony being experimental, and i’m not mad.
After the failure of the PSvita Sony, pretty much did not want to participate in the portable gaming market again, but even so after PSvita’s failure Sony is now planning on releasing a new portable console, or better put, a peripheral for the PS5 that is able to stream games and play them.
As we know Sony’s approach to the portable consoles is strange, releasing the PSP model 1000 on December 12th 2004 in Japan, on the 25th of February 2005 in North America, and it was released later in Europe on August 5th 2005.
The console was a direct competitor to Nintendo’s DS system, gaining a lot of popularity among gamers, especially in Japan, Sony then later releasing follow-ups of the PSP with versions such as the PSP 2000, 3000, Go and PSP Street or E1000 exclusively for Europe.
The PSP was an amazing console, with hundreds of amazing games to play. Known as a RPG machine, the PSP was an amazing competition to Nintendo’s DS console finally seizing production in 2014. Giving it a life cycle of a decade and still being praised and loved even today. With thousands of fans all around the world.
After the PSP Sony wanted to create another portable console seeing the success of their first handheld. This came in the form of a new console with a touch screen and 2 joysticks known as the PlayStation Vita.
The PSvita is an interesting console which wanted to improve on everything the PSP did and more, coming out on December 17th 2011 for Japan, February 15th 2012 for North America and February 22nd 2012 for Europe, the PSvita as it was known was a console that is often defined as wasted potential, with a console so powerful and so many good starting games such as Gravity Rush, Uncharted Golden Abyss, and Little Big Planet Vita, many companies truly had a lot of faith in the potential of this product, however Sony did not payed a lot of attention to it leading it to its downfall. Lacking many games and being forgotten by Sony it was later discontinued in 2019. However, same as the PSP the PSvita still has a large community to this day, with people being hopeful on the console, and still believing in it, having faith that perhaps Sony in the future can continue to do another handheld console and give it the care that the PSvita needed. Truly a console ahead of its time.
This brings us to the present day, after various statements that Sony does not have any plans on returning to portable gaming market we find ourselves surprised that Sony is kinda returning to the handheld gaming market but not in the form of a completely new console but a peripheral only known at the moment as “Project Q” which we have gotten a look at and it looks interesting but somewhat attached to the PS5, what i mean by that is that as mentioned earlier this aims to be more of a peripheral rather than a full handheld console.
Which makes us think that this could be Sony being experimental seeing the success of the Nintendo Switch and things like Cloud Gaming, they are making an experimental but relatively safe approach since the handheld market is mainly dominated by phones and Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch, being 3DS the last handheld to be discontinued we only have two consoles in the market currently. We’ll see if this “Project Q” is well received and used by players. And who knows maybe if it’s successful Sony might consider the development of another full on handheld console that can compete with switch.