I think the hardware looks neat and makes sense for around-the-house more than on-the-go. Sony knows how to do inputs, so grafting a DualSense to a small tablet is not the worst idea for a handheld gaming device!
@cassidy it is definitely aimed at streamed gaming at home. It looks clunky and not very sturdy. However if it will be smooth integration, it won't matter that much. Price, however, will. At the moment Sony is not doing great with pricing their peripherals.
@peteriskrisjanis at $200 I could see it being attractive—I have wanted to play Horizon more than once while my wife watches something on the TV. :)
That said, I recently got a Pixel Tablet with a bigger screen, and can officially pair a DualSense 5 and use the Remote Play app already… which is a bit clunky for on-the-go, but is perfectly fine at home.
So… yeah. If it’s ONLY remote play, it’s not as attractive to me.
@cassidy I feel this is for casual owners of PS5, which will want something integrated. Also 200 USD is not that big price, yes. Comparing to PSVR2 anyway :D
But… Sony goes out of the way to say it is only for Remote Play from a PS5. I get why that’s the focus to start (make the primary use really good!), but I still wonder if they have plans to ship a PS Store app and let you download games.
PS1, PS2, PSP, maybe even Vita games would be sick on it—they’ve brought a LOT of those titles to the PS5 as downloads instead of only via streaming as before, and that would actually make this a decent retro gaming handheld.
They also go out of their way to say it’s not compatible with PlayStation Plus streaming, even when those games are streaming to the linked PS5 (likely due to bidirectional bandwidth issues). But streaming directly from PlayStation Plus seems like such an obvious reason for this handheld to exist! Surely they’re working on that?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Stadia was good, actually. 😉 And I think Sony is closest to being able to replicate it.
My experience with PS Remote Play on Android has been less than stellar. That’s why I’m MOST cautious about this device, anyway—it’s one thing if it’s a free gimmick I can use to wrap up a quest on my tablet while my wife watches TV, but a $200 dedicated device?
Before you say it’s my Wi-Fi, I used Stadia exclusively as my console for a year. Remote Play hasn’t held a candle to that experience, even when on the very same network with my PS5 on Ethernet.
Oh, and… it’s hard to justify this over something else that I can use on a bus, train, plane, etc. I get that it has a place in the home as a local device, but it just seems like such a bummer to not have any offline capability whatsoever.
I would love to use my phone less, and a portable console could help with that. As it stands, I might as well just use my phone and a controller mount for a similar experience at home, and a better experience on the go.
@cassidy Remote play is terrible for anyone who plays games with any precision. I got it working on my Steam Deck on a super-fast mesh network. I've tried it on my Studio Display (because: no HDMI in) in the same room. Both have been noticeably laggy.
The idea that I'd be away from home and gaming via a Portal connection to my PS5 is, quite frankly, laughable.
@dajb yuuup. I’ve tried it remotely with PS Remote Play and it worked technically, but was awful.
I know I’m a broken record, but this is where Stadia blew me away. Most of the time I literally couldn’t tell it wasn’t running on the device—except I would get PS5 graphics on my phone or Chromecast. :)
They were so far ahead of everyone else experience-wise. I am guessing those YouTube local data centers had something to do with it, but even so, it was better than gaming on my local network!
@cassidy Agreed, I was fully bought in to Stadia. Playing Sniper Elite 4 in super-high def was amazing, as was the ability to okay it on any device.
Xbox Game Cloud is OK but nothing compared to Stadia when it was working well. At least Google did the right thing and refunded everyone. I've got a couple of very good Bluetooth controllers now to use with my Steam Deck when I plug it into my TV! 🙌
We've been using Steam's in-home streaming since it was in beta, and it was really smooth even then. Good video quality, low latency (<12ms), and this was 1080p between a Win host with a used upper-mid tier AMD GPU, and a client running Ubuntu on a mediocre 7 yr old Dell. They were both wired, but we had good luck with the Steam Link on WiFi later, too.
I would think Sony should be able to match that experience almost a decade later. Weird.
@danep to be fair, my most recent experience was actually playable—I did a bit of LEGO Star Wars and Horizon Forbidden West, and was able to kill some time. I’ll have to keep checking it out—maybe they fixed their issues in anticipation of this device? 🤷
@cassidy to me the only one able to replicate Stadia is Xbox with Game Pass and cloud streaming.
I’m playing a lot of ps5 streaming and it was a little bit cumbersome on Windows, on Linux it doesn’t work at all unless you have a Win VM (thanks Virtualbox for that)
And the thing that irks me the most is this: Portal can’t stream games and can be used only for remote play. It’s a joke. My use case is @Killbilla constantly stealing my PS5 so I can’t play remotely, I have to resort to streaming 😂
@dottorblaster ha yeah fair point, can’t remote play if someone’s playing the PS5. :)
I just feel like this HAS to be a planned update for PlayStation Portal, right?? It’s just too obvious. Buuut never buy hardware based on future promises—and especially based on future hopes. 😅
@cassidy absolutely! i just hope they have something in mind because they are just selling a piece of hardware that does the same thing the Steam Deck does with an app
Soooooouh…
I really can’t understand where are they heading with all this Remote Play and Cloud Streaming stuff. It looks like they are run by two different companies, they have different apps (Remote Play VS Playstation Plus), different hardware, different mechanics. Like they were two competing business units
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