Sony's New Handheld PlayStation: The Future of Portable Gaming

It's been a long, long 12 years since Sony las entered the portable gaming segment. The follow-up to the PSP, the Vita in 2011/2012, was the last time that Sony made a concerted effort to entice gamers away from their TV screens and living rooms and back into their palms.

Now, arguably off the back of the success of Valve's Steam Deck, and with the hype that Asus's ROG Ally is creating, Sony seems to be experiencing FOMO and wants back-in to the portable gaming market. Enter "Project Q".

Before you get too excited, however, beware that the Project Q is set to be a steaming hand-held. Not a full-fledged independent console. In essence it will steam your PS5 gameplay over your WiFi, or what's colloquially becoming known as 'Cloud Gaming'. It has it's pro's and con's for sure, but ultimately this won't be a high-powered console that you can take on a long flight and let off some steam. You'll need a strong WiFi connection, as with all streaming devices, and you can expect input lag that can be the difference between life and death in fast-paced titles.

Which begs the question, what's the real market for these types of devices? At the crux of the issue, you ideally need to be at home, on the same WiFi connection as the console you're streaming from to get the best results. When these restrictions are imposed, I feel like 9 times out of 10 the player would rather just turn on their console and sit in front of their TV in the comfort of their living room, right? For this author personally, the real benefit of a handheld is to leave the house and play games were you couldn't have dreamed of playing AAA titles before: on public transport, on a plane, on vacation.

On the plus side, due to not needing heavyweight hardware, these types of devices typically have much longer battery lives their full-fat brothers such as the Steam Deck, AyaNeo's, GPD Win's etc etc. So it's rumoured that the Project Q will provide upwards of 4 hours of gaming on a single charge. That's good.

But back to the negatives, you will need to own a PS5 to be able to use the Project Q. That's bad. You also won't be able to stream or leverage PS VR titles, which, may have been a given but we thought we'd mention that too.

Release Date:

Sony are staying tight-lipped for now, other than saying that it will launch later this year. Whether that means August or December is anyones guess, however we'd imagine this to be a holiday release. I'm sure, despite my reservations around what the size of the market is for streaming devices like this, that it could be a holiday hit for the younger, less discerning audience.

Project Q Price:

Also TBC is the price for the Project Q - given that cloud gaming consoles typically command a lower price than their 'dedicated rendering' counter-parts, we'd expect the Project Q to launch at less than $500 US. This is an educated guess based off of comparable devices. For example, the Steam Deck starts from $500 and can be used anywhere, sans WiFi whilst Logitech's G Cloud console is sub-$400. Factor in the 'Sony Premium' and we think it will land squarely in the $400-500 starting range.