The lack of Bluetooth is a real bummer for what otherwise is a thing I could see making an ill-advised financial decision on.
Streaming only? Might as well sell it to me pre-bricked lmao
I think the idea of a streaming handheld is cool and I’ve considered building one for my own use (I don’t wanna play on the go, just in bed). So I get the appeal of this I guess but 1) not for PS5 only and 2) not for $200??? Like where would you even play this thing???
It’s baffling all around. The PS5 has built in streaming to any phone or tablet with an app, and the controller is Bluetooth so you can play that way. I’ve played PS5 games in the bath with my phone and my dualsense. What is this $200 solving that isn’t already solved?
This whole thing is just an enigma considering they could have had a $200 streaming only device aimed at people who want to play PS5 titles without owning a PS5 and had to have a mandatory PS Plus Premium ($120 annual) subscription. A core part of modern businesses is to get people stuck in a subscription loop and despite having the perfect opportunity to get an entire new set of customers on this path (which arguably is more lucrative then someone buying a PS5) they fumbled it completely. The Steam Deck is a better experience for this then Sony’s own handheld. How do you screw up so bad that your competition, who isn’t even a major hardware manufacturer, is doing better with your own service?
There is a world where they drop this announcement along with rolling out apps for Android TV, AppleTV, etc that allows you to use PS Plus Cloud Streaming and if you pick up the PlayStation Portal you get 3 months of PlayStation Plus Premium for free. Your progress transfers between the Portal and your TV so you can now game anywhere you want. Now you have an entire new audience of customers signup for a recurring subscription. The capitalist dream. Instead we get a piece of junk that will be forgotten in 4 months.
What I wouldn’t give to be able to read the internal Slack chats and emails about this at Sony.
Hey if you think this is baffling now, just wait until you see what this means for Canadians. Here where I’m at, this shit’s $270.33 plus tax-- and with tax, it’s uh, over $300 fucking dollars. You can probably glean what that also means for their proprietary wireless audio devices, too.
For comparison, a refurb Steam Deck 64gb with tax is about $450, let alone yknow, any cheaper device that runs Remote Play just fine too.
I didn’t think they could out-unwise their pricing decisions with the PSVR2, but this is really giving it a run for its absolute lack of value. This isn’t actually the part people like about Apple’s exorbitant ecosystem either so it’s the funniest way they could very obviously chase those coattails.
Almost makes me worried for the future of Remote Play apps, even if chiaki remains as a (kinda weird kinda bad) fallback if they pull some shit. Though in reality this has already become PR poison so maybe that’s not a real worry at all.
I’m still a bit bitter at Sony’s handheld shenanigans - not merely the PSP/Vita’s short supported lifespan, but also their active steps to limit aftermarket use and network access on home consoles.
In specific, the PS4 had a remote app that was, for a while, sony phone only. Fair enough. But eventually they released a public version for android phones. Great! Only it used on-screen controls. These could be disabled, and a third party controller enabled, with very little tweaking.
Well, that tweaking meant you might skip using their 1st party controller, so those modded files were blacklisted. Further updates forced some phones into failing compatibility. Finally remote play over WAN was disabled altogether without a PSplus account.
None of these steps were illegal or anything - their network, their rules and so on…but there was a moment where the combination of advancing technologies made it possible to have a device like this Portal, with wide compatibility and a near-magical feeling when it all worked. Sony actively undermined this feature set when they had trouble monetizing/controlling the usage of it, even for owners of PS4s. Meanwhile, Xbox started from behind and now has the largest console streaming service ever.
And now there’s a device to sell. Several, actually - but I’ve been burned enough by Sony’s desire for user lock-in. What’s to stop this from being just another dead controller in two years?
Extremely late to the party, but I saw this and it broke my heart. I love handheld consoles, and when I first saw this announced, I had tinge of hope that maybe we’d be getting something like a Vita 2…how foolish I was 
Sony saw the massive success of the Switch, the Steam Deck, saw a slew of other handheld PC competitors, and decided to dive in with…this? Hardware is hard I know, but this isn’t Sony’s first rodeo, and I’d argue from a hardware perspective the PSP and Vita are actually pretty solid devices. Sony decided to make two models of PS5s one of which is “digital only”, could they not have done something similar here with this “streaming only” model and a second model with maybe some decent internals and onboard memory?
All that aside, one of the most baffling things to me is this disclaimer on the PS Blog site:
***Games that require a VR headset (PlayStation VR or PlayStation VR2) or additional peripherals (other than a DUALSHOCK 4, DualSense, or DualSense Edge wireless controller) are not compatible. Games that must be streamed on PS5 using a PS Plus Premium membership are not compatible.
…What? Games requiring peripherals I can understand, but why are the games that you get access to via a PS+ Premium subscription not supported?? I haven’t used it, but does regular PS5 remote play also have this restriction?
If I recall, you cannot remote play streaming games. My guess is latency plus latency makes it miserable and instead of letting people walk into a clunky experience they just don’t let you. There might be some other technical reason behind the scenes, I’m no software engineer.
I feel like Sony took two swings at a handheld and botched it both times so they’re almost certainly never going to try a third time unless something dramatic changes in the market. Personally I feel like they tried to leverage the console experience on the go thing way earlier than it was viable and suffered for it. I feel like a big part of the Switch being a success is that Nintendo made games that while you could feasibly play for hours on end, you could also play for fifteen minutes and get a decent experience.