Bloomberg is reporting that Sony, fresh off the failure of the PlayStation Portal and having had eight years to survey the success of the Nintendo Switch, is maybe planning on launching a more serious handheld device. One that, instead of letting you beam your PS5 games to a portable screen, would just let you play PS5 games on the handheld directly.
The report, which is pretty thin, says that the Portal itself was once planned to be a standalone gaming handheld, like its predecessors the PSP and Vita. The fact it wasn't is probably what has most doomed it, something Sony is maybe taking onboard with these plans for a new handheld, plans that Bloomberg couch by saying are years away, and may not ever come to fruition at all.
Maybe they will, maybe they won't! I for one want them to though, and not just because both of Sony's previous dedicated handhelds were great portable gaming devices. It's because a new device--which I'm going to call the PlayStation Portalble until I'm ordered to stop--might be arriving at a moment in history when I can ask for the return of the Universal Media Disc and have it not be a complete joke.
A device like this would be years away, for reasons like the fact the battery capacity for handheld PS5 games just isn't there yet; even the Steam Deck can only last a few hours, and its games can be fully scaled via their PC settings. A PS5 game just trying to run would be like going back in time to the Game Gear, chewing through entire packs of batteries by the minute. So there's time for this thing to arrive, for internal hardware to get smaller, for batteries to get more economical. Time for things to change, for trends to take shape.
If years away, it could be arriving at a time when the market, having long drifted towards the convenience of digital purchases--as evidenced by Sony's own PS5 re-release--would be having not just second thoughts about forever renting content, but third and fourth as well. Physical media is coming back, baby, and there wouldn't be many companies better poised to capitalise on a desire for proprietary physical media than Sony, the company that brought us everything from Betamax to the Blu-Ray to the...UMD.
With internal space at a premium in a handheld gaming device, storage expensive and money to be made selling weird discs that you also happen to be the only one making, the UMD's return would be triumphant. Watching a full-sized PS5 disc get awkwardly sucked into a PS5 is an unfulfilling experience. Slamming a UMD that contains a miniaturised PS5 game into the back of a new Sony handheld would rule. Especially if, like the original UMD, a successor format didn't just contain games, but movies as well!
Will any of this actually happen? Probably not! The device itself might not even get made, and even if it did, there's a greater chance it would be digital-only, because we live in hell. But a man can still dream. Of simpler times, and discs that came in cartridges, and the chance for Sony to re-release The Last Of Us for the 17th time...
