16
votes
Leaker claims that a PlayStation 6 Portable is in the pipeline
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- Title
- Leaker Claims We Are Getting PlayStation 6 Portable - Here's Why Sony Should Copy Nintendo Switch 2
- Authors
- Brent Koepp, Luis Prada, Anthony Franklin II, Paige Gawley, Shaun Cichacki, Stephen Andrew Galiher, Jake Uitti
- Published
- Apr 15 2025
- Word count
- 724 words
The current Xbox and PlayStations are pretty powerful. Why not just… wait five years, wait for this insane administration to be voted out, and in the meantime, focus on releasing good, finished games? We don’t need a new console every new moon.
That's not how hardware cycles work. You have to start years in advance.
The hardware team at Sony and the studios they own have almost nothing to do with each other (not even in the same country), and development on the PS6 will not take away any more resources from the game studios and vice versa.
You’re right, but as @Akir pointed out (and that was my point), I don’t see a reason why we need to refresh the hardware so quickly when we have reached diminishing returns, graphically speaking.
Some of it is marketing (the switch 2 will be "new", the ps5 will be "old" once the switch 2 ships). Some of it is profit motive (an excuse to bump game price points, resell ports and enhanced editions). Some of it is competition (what if Microsoft develops a new console and they don't?). And finally some of it is staffing. It's hard to just turn off and on hardware, software and SDK design teams every 10 years. You get to spend some of that time on a mid-cycle refresh these days like the PS5 pro, but then you gotta have a product to justify to your shareholders why you employ these people, or if you stop employing these people then you won't be able to react when it is time for another go around.
Upvoted because it’s a logical answer and explanation to my question about why these profit-driven companies can’t make a logical decision.
I’m confused as to the relation with the headline. If the rumor is true, this would be a successor to the PS vita which came out in 2011.
Graphics have definitely come a long way since then.
Seriously, graphics have had diminishing returns for the past decade at least. There wasn’t really much of a need for the PS5 to begin with; we are still getting PS4 games released today, however many years after the 5 launched. And while they might not look 100% as nice as the PS5 edition, they are close enough that one might not care to upgrade.
Is this next console generation going to be the equivalent of when everyone tried to hop on the Wii's motion controls in the sixth Gen?
Microsoft has already thrown their hat back into the always online ring with their "cloud streaming handhelds" and I'm guessing Sony will come out with something akin to the GameGear - technically more competent but completely missing the point... But seeing Nintendo's current price points maybe they can hang!
The Portal already feels pretty close to that description.
The portal didn't miss the point, though. It's been a very successful product for Sony and has sold fantastically.
The portal is Sony doing the Wii U but with the benefit of that failures hindsight.
Now they're doing the switch, but they're competing against the switch 2. I gotta imagine it'll be most on price, particularly since the switch 2 is plenty powerful for games to not need a massive downgrade like they did with switch 1.
I don't think the portal and the wiiu have all that much to do with each other. The Portal's main selling point is that Sony realized the niche of "play the PS5 without using the TV" (this is also why reddit fails to understand the appeal) is a big one.
Was the not the main selling point of the Wii U?
No. The primary use of the tablet controller was as a secondary input, and secondary display unit, effectively working like the second screen on a DS. Games were designed around it such that minimap information would exclusively live on the controller's screen.
Although the WiiU did support something akin to the portal's functionality, it was niche, and was a game-by-game addition, which many games did not support at all.
The Game Gear was also pretty fantastic and had some amazing games for it. It has a fairly large library.
The Game Gear ate 6x AA batteries every play session, it was not really portable.
It was very fun to play in my room, plugged to the wall. Once I got access to a tv it was was not that great.
Such stories have been greatly exaggerated by people who did not own them. The Game Gear easily lasts around 6-8 hours, if not longer. People thought it had terrible battery life because some people used nickel metal hydrate rechargeable batteries which had lower capacity and would cause the system to shut down quickly because the voltage would drop much faster. As an early rechargeable battery they also degraded very quickly, so after relatively few charge cycles their use would be even further diminished.
The owners manual actually specified to use Alkaline batteries, and if you did so it was perfectly usable as a portable device. I still own my Game Gear and I literally only ever play it with batteries.
The death of exclusives really killed the idea of owning a console for me. I have a PS5 and it just sits there. If I were using TVs instead of monitors I could maybe justify having it as a media station, but for my use case there's really not much reason to have one when I can wait a few months to play a game on PC with an input method I prefer. The only game where I thought the console/controller added unique value was the last Spider-Man, but haptic feedback hardly justifies the price pint.
As far as handhelds go, I see the same issue if they are trying to compete with the switch. If i'm going to invest in a device it's probably best to get the one that gives me the most access to games I can't currently play.
Interesting. We’ll have to see what they do but I wouldn’t be surprised if this thing shares more in common with the Steam Deck architecturally than it does a Nintendo Switch, probably being built with an AMD APU of some sort. It’d line up with Sony positioning PlayStations as powerful consoles and would get them “free” PS4 (and potentially light PS5) backwards compatibility with no emulation performance penalty.
If the rumors hold out that it is PS5 compatible, and it's the cheapest way people can experience Astro Bot, that's probably going to move a lot of units, even if people are just leaving them hooked up to the TV most of the time.