Why would Sony make another handheld when they could just take $5B and burn it in an oil barrel?
Why PS would probably never make a true portable console.
- Thread starter historia
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Why would Nintendo, Valve and so many other make portables? What happens when MS shows up with the inevitable portable of their own and closes the gap by an extra 10m+?
I'll enjoy seeing you diehard PS fans coming up with excuses when PS gets choked out of it's dominant console position due to Sony just taking everything for granted. PS didn't got where it is by simply chasing short term profits disregarding their core audience.
Playstation never had a dominant position in handhelds. It had one solid success with PSP and one massive flop with Vita. At the same time, Nintendo had to completely abandon console development to hang on to their handheld position. 3DS was crashing and burning similarly to Vita before they gave WiiU the kiss of death and put all their teams on handheld. Playstation obviously made the right choice committing to PS4.
You can't compare Steam Deck to Switch, Vita, etc. Deck playing unmodified PC games is a totally different sell than dedicated ports. Switch2 is going to come out and they're going to ask $60 for shitty ports that under perform the PS4 in 2025. Deck (and friends) don't require any sacrifices. If you buy a $60 game for your Steam Deck, you got the best version of the game. You can play the same purchase with the same save on a good PC and get the 'full fat' experience. That's a future I want to hang on to.
Even with the Vita being a massive flop it still sold 15m+ with Sony making pretty much every possible wrong decision. Giving up on the portable market is going to be PlayStation undoing.
Nintendo didn't abandon the console market they figured out a way to be present on both the portable and regular console markets.
PC players get free online, access to the PS/Xbox/PC library, option to play their games natively on the go, option to buy their games on multiple storefronts, far better backwards compatibility, don't need patches that never come to improve performance on last gen games, etc. At some point every PS player will end up feeling like a sucker for stuck with Sony. With discs on the way out PlayStation is now the PS+ machine, aimed at casuals while enthusiasts will all end up moving to PC.
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Making Vita in the first place was the wrong decision. The market moved on.
Nintendo absolutely abandoned the console market, and they completely gave up on making cutting edge games. They're fully 2 generations behind right now.
I agree Steam offers an unbeatable value to gamers right now, and all the legacy 1st parties should be scrambling to get their games on it.
As much as I love Playstation, I rather see no more portable console from Sony. That way, Switch will get all the games so I can have all-in-one portable console (And I don't like competition, just like I hate xbone sooooo much 
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Those are from 3 years ago. HBM cost per GB has been increasing, mostly because it's the only memory being used in high-performance compute and machine learning accelerators that sell with enormous margins, and becauseof packaging costs.
You could do all of this with a PS4 Portable. I think you guys are misinterpreting what some of us are talking about here. A new portable that is 100% compatible with PS4 games at PS4 settings, and 100% compatible with select PS5 games (those which are simpler in scope and don't use a lot of the PS5's actual power) which could easily be scaled down to PS4-like settings by dropping the native internal resolution and maybe cutting back on some framerate options, but little else. These would be a lot of the newer AA and indie 1P & 3P releases, primarily.
And with those games, you can play them on a PS4 Portable, a PS4, or a PS5 (where you can get a "full fat" experience with additional resolution & framerate options). Exactly the same thing you are suggesting can be done with a Steam Deck & PC. You wouldn't need to buy specific versions of these games for a PS4 Portable, either: you buy the game for PS4 or PS5, you can play that same copy on a PS4 Portable.
On the software front, the one thing Sony would need to do is actually expand back into AA 1P software production, or at least partner with 3P devs to do that, preferably with legacy IP & new IP mix. Games with more reasonable budgets ($10 million - $40 million), less demanding scope in term of certain game systems, physics, AI etc. that would not scale well downward, and could be easily scaled with slight adjustments to run well on a PS4 and PS4 Portable.
That doesn't mean the costs have shot back up to where they were in 2016 or 2017, however. HBM costs increased the same reason all RAM prices increased for a while; since those conditions have subsided, prices for RAM have dropped off some. That would include HBM.
Keep in mind too, that virtually all of HBM's clients are smaller companies, or companies ordering in much smaller volumes. So, they are not enjoying a lot of economies of scale. That would be different for Sony, which would make costs a lot more manageable.
Please. Everything else is an inate workaround to access games. Sony are the best people to embrace BC/digital/portable rather than streaming, standardize against a lower spec PS4 than current games, stop being pinchered by Valve and MS
Sony's overriding, all-encompassing mission is maintaining and expanding the dominance of PS5. I can't think of a bigger blunder than re-launching PS4 as a handheld platform. A new bespoke PSP3 would be a dumb, expensive mistake. A handheld PS4 would be self-sabotage.
I find it funny how people always point to the Steamdeck as something sony should be looking at, and while it’s a big success for a platform like Valve people would drag sony worse than they are the PSVR2 if it put out a handheld doing steamdeck numbers.
Steamdeck has only sold like 2 million units in two years, and now theres more competition than ever. Sony really has no place in the dedicated handheld market.
You either make a handheld or you make a home console, you can’t do both and actively support both. You need one dedicated platform. It was hard enough to have enough content back when games only took a year or two to make, now they take at least 4 and up to 7.
Steamdeck has only sold like 2 million units in two years, and now theres more competition than ever. Sony really has no place in the dedicated handheld market.
You either make a handheld or you make a home console, you can’t do both and actively support both. You need one dedicated platform. It was hard enough to have enough content back when games only took a year or two to make, now they take at least 4 and up to 7.
PS5 will just end up isolated when other platforms offer the option to play games (including PlayStation games) on the go without the need for awful streaming experience. We already saw what happens in Japan a country that favors portables.
The Series S makes it so the minimum requirements for current gen games will be kept really low for the entire gen, perfect for Nintendo and Valve to capitalize on it to eat into PlayStation market share.
Any PlayStation owner that goes after something like the Deck is already building his library on a direct competitor and getting used to playing on PC(usually the greatest barrier).
Valve is not incompetent like Xbox, they'll make Sony pay for every mistake they make.
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It has been the cycle for 30 years now. Portable would replace consoles>mobile would replace portable.
They still co-exist today.
Nintendo killed their home consoles because they have been hit or miss since the N64. Playstation dominates thanks in part to 2 successive flops from Nintendo on the home console market from 1996 through 2006. Flops way worse than anything by Xbox for example. Basically a red carpet for a whole decade.
It's not sound strategy to ask Playstation to divert resources from their home console where they always killed it sales wise to a portable.
Playstation customers want a console with decent specs at a good price to play graphically demanding games. They won't settle to play a Great Value version of their favourite franchises at dynamic 720x400 30 FPS. That's a Nintendo thing.
The day they do that, many millions of ps customers will jump ship to Xbox or build gaming rigs.
It's not sound strategy to ask Playstation to divert resources from their home console where they always killed it sales wise to a portable.
Playstation customers want a console with decent specs at a good price to play graphically demanding games. They won't settle to play a Great Value version of their favourite franchises at dynamic 720x400 30 FPS. That's a Nintendo thing.
The day they do that, many millions of ps customers will jump ship to Xbox or build gaming rigs.
33M vs 24M? Not that big of a difference considering you are Nintendo. Massive flop for them. GameCube was even worse.
We don't want an underpowered, or split library handheld.
We know there'll be some drawbacks like probably digital only, PS4 level only as opposed to PS5 level, lower resolution perhaps as portable machine, a lesser non-oled screen? Maybe? etc. We can go with this device for now, and a PS5 Portable down the line, next gen or whenever.
It's my own PS games, saves, friends, chats I want to bring with me portabley, after all.
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It wasn't black and white back then, Nintendo did really well against juggernauts like the PS1 and PS2 during those generations.
I'd just like to say I've spent 40mins on the bus hopping between PS Remote Play and PSPlay, and I might have gotten 5 mins on tetris effect connected, where it was too slow to properly respond quick, or see through some pixelations. Fucking tetris.
Like that PS2 handheld above, do a native handheld with downloadable games onto storage. FUCK STREAMING / REMOTE PLAY ONLY.
UK Internet isn't strong enough for it