Who would have thought that we would be talking about a Sony laptop again, which we imagined would be disgusted with this market for life after the failure of the PlayStation Vita? And yet, like Microsoft, whose mastermind, Phil Spencer, no longer makes any secret on the issue, the Japanese manufacturer is in the process of developing a portable console, according to Bloomberg's sources. The trick is that there is apparently no question of creating a successor to the PSP and PS Vita as it would not be a platform that would require developing games specifically for She. The PS Vita experience clearly showed that the support of third-party publishers was not satisfactory to chase several hares at once, not to mention Sony's own teams, already busy supplying the catalog of home machines. Even Nintendo preferred to merge its two production lines (home and portable) into one to give birth to the Switch.
In this context, the quality of the cloud gaming experience offered by Sony, as just shown by the recent update of the PlayStation Portal, already opened up some avenues for reflection. If we can imagine that the cloud will have a role to play in one way or another, Bloomberg goes further by affirming that this future laptop will simply be able to read (natively) the PS5 catalog, which implies that it will not be available for a certain number of years (just like the laptop currently under study at Microsoft, moreover). Bloomberg even covers its back by specifying that at this stage, Sony Interactive Entertainment could still decide not to market it. Even if it were to be released in parallel with the future PS6, this portable device could in any case cleverly extend the life of the PS5 in a different format.
Compared to the time of the PS Vita, the video game landscape has seen some changes regarding the portable market. In addition to the success of the Switch, whose hybrid concept remains a separate case study, laptops have regained a certain level of love with devices like the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally, which have blurred the boundaries between consoles and nomadic PCs. The exact positioning of Sony's future laptop, however, remains to be determined, as do its actual capabilities. The possibility of finding the PlayStation ecosystem on a portable device should in any case not hurt the manufacturer in a country like Japan, while allowing it to reach a slightly wider audience.
- Also read | PlayStation Portal: Sony's secret weapon to overtake Microsoft on the cloud?
- Also read | Phil Spencer: Microsoft's laptop won't be released for “years”