PlayStation Portal launched in November 2023 as little more than a glorified second screen for PlayStation 5. Now, a year on from release, it finally has some greater use as a gaming device in its own right, with Sony’s announcement that dedicated game streaming is coming to the handheld. The question is, does this mark a tipping point for mainstream adoption of cloud gaming, or is it just a stepping stone to Sony fully reentering the handheld console market?
The PlayStation Portal was always an odd piece of hardware—a DualSense controller chopped in half, with an 8-inch screen wedged in the middle. Unlike Sony’s previous dedicated handhelds, the PlayStation Portable (or PSP) and PS Vita, Portal was merely a remote viewer, allowing players to stream games from their PS5 over a home network—useful to ease arguments over who got access to the TV or if you wanted to jump back into God of War without getting out of bed, but not really suited for anything else.
The restrictions didn’t end there—although the Portal could technically be used out of the house, it still required your PS5 being active at home, and there being a high-speed Wi-Fi connection wherever you were trying to play from. The Portal doesn’t feature any cellular connectivity itself though, and it wasn’t until June 2024 that it could connect to public networks (even then, only 2.4-Ghz ones; support for 5-Ghz came a month later)—so, before this, tethering to your phone and hoping your data package held up was your only option. Realistically, Portal was an at-home-only device in most use cases.
Silver Linings
Until now. Possibly as a result of the Portal being a surprise success for Sony, the gadget is being updated to support cloud gaming features, independent of a PS5. The update, rolling out across North America, Europe, and Japan, will allow subscribers to Sony’s PlayStation Plus Premium service to access “over 120 PS5 games from the PS Plus Game Catalog,” including the likes of Ghost of Tsushima and Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
Courtesy of Playstation
As cloud streaming for Portal is in beta, there are a lot of missing features, though. Users won’t be able to play “streaming games purchased on PS Store,”—only those included in the subscription-dependent Premium catalog—and it’s restricted to PS5 titles. PS3 and PS4 games are explicitly excluded, which seems slightly odd.
Game trials are also locked out, as are some system features, such as party voice chat, 3D audio support, or “in-game commerce.” That last one’s probably a good thing to leave out for now—the last thing anyone wants is a dropped connection potentially messing up a DLC transaction involving real money.
Sony says games can be streamed at up to 1080p full HD quality at 60 fps, with save data able to be transferred over the cloud, too. “Up to” is key though—you’ll need a minimum 5 Mbps of up/download speeds to even establish a cloud gaming session, with 720p quality requiring a minimum 7 Mbps, and 1080p needing 13 Mbps. Realistically, based on similar game streaming services and the Portal’s own performance even on an in-home network, expect to need even higher speeds for a viable experience.
End of the Console Era?
What’s particularly interesting here is timing. Portal as it launched was essentially an evolution of the same Remote Play feature that Sony has been offering in various incarnations for decades—PSP used the earliest version of the tech to connect to PS3 back in 2006, followed by PS Vita pairing with PS3 and PS4.
Nowadays, almost any device with a screen, an internet connection, and a paired controller can use Remote Play to stream a mirror of your PS5—Portal was just a dedicated bit of kit to do that on. The introduction of cloud gaming may make Portal that bit more feature-rich, but it may also point to a growing trend among console manufacturers to leave the console behind entirely.
Take Sony’s arch gaming rival Microsoft—its current marketing push is that almost anything “is an Xbox.” A large part of that hinges on accessing Xbox services “with the help of Cloud Gaming,” turning any device with a screen, an internet connection, and a paired controller (sound familiar?) into an Xbox.
Nintendo, meanwhile, has allowed certain games to launch on the Switch as cloud-only titles, and although this is usually restricted to titles that are typically too demanding or too large for the Switch to run natively (such as Resident Evil Village or Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy), it shows even the notoriously conservative Japanese company isn’t averse to at least experimenting with games that only exist in the ether.
If anything, Microsoft is leaning into the console-free approach even harder. To date, its cloud gaming offering resembled what Sony has just announced for Portal—a curated selection of titles available to Game Pass Ultimate subscribers.
That’s changing though, with the announcement that players will be able to stream select games that they own, even if they’re not included in the current Game Pass line-up. It’s a limited selection at present, and still requires a subscription to the highest tier of Game Pass to access the feature, but it means players could conceivably buy and play Xbox games without ever actually owning an Xbox console.
Blue Sky Thinking
We’ve been here before though—cloud gaming has been a pipe dream at least as far back as 2010, when OnLive took a stab at it. That never quite delivered, and even as internet connection speeds have increased, ostensibly making cloud gaming more viable, it’s never really felt even close to taking off. Even now, in the case of Microsoft’s “everything’s an Xbox” approach, the reality is still far from ideal, with latency issues proving the need for dedicated hardware to run games on.
Connection speeds and delivery technology aside, people like owning their games, too, even if it’s just as a digital download locally installed on their machine rather than a physical disc or cartridge. It’s a nut Google was never able to crack with Stadia, which asked players to purchase individual games at full price, on top of a subscription for 4K streaming quality.
We all know what happened to Stadia. Although it eventually made good, refunding customers everything they spent on purchasing games or hardware such as controllers, it was a loud and embarrassing failure, not just for Google but for cloud gaming as a concept.
But Stadia’s collapse didn’t kill the sector entirely—cloud gaming services such as Amazon Luna and Nvidia’s GeForce Now still champion the idea, and Netflix continues to quietly push its gaming credentials, even if it’s largely focused on mobile and indie games packaged with its core video streaming offering. Yet, if even Google, with as close to infinite money as it’s possible to imagine, can’t make cloud gaming take flight, it’s tough to imagine how anyone can.
Perhaps the new development for PlayStation Portal will be different. Google really never knew what it was doing with Stadia, Luna doesn’t appear to have a clear direction beyond existing as part of the Amazon monolith, and Netflix shutters development studios before they can ever even announce a game. Conversely, after 30 years as a market leader, Sony more than has its priors when it comes to gaming; if it thinks cloud gaming’s time has come, maybe players will finally show up.
Courtesy of Playstation
In the Back Pocket
Then again, it may all be a stopgap measure. Bloomberg reports Sony is in early-days development on a new portable console that will play PS5 games, with the implication being that it would do so natively, rather than via cloud gaming. If true, there’s a certain sense to the move.
For one thing, there’s the looming specter of Nintendo Switch 2 (or whatever it ends up being called). With the original Switch having racked up more than 143.4 million units sold (PS4’s lifetime sales, for comparison, were “more than 117 million“), it’s not a huge stretch to imagine Sony wanting a slice of that pie for its PlayStation business.
Portability has been key to the Switch’s success, and that’s largely down to having games locally available—beyond those few aforementioned cloud gaming releases, most Switch games can be played anywhere, with or without an internet connection. The Portal, a black mirror unless it’s online, can’t hope to offer anything close to the same experience.
Then there’s the Steam Deck, which has been a game changer for portable gaming. Although manufacturer Valve has been quiet on exact numbers sold (saying only that it has sold “multiple millions” of units), the number of rival handheld gaming PCs such as the ASUS ROG Ally X or Lenovo Legion Go that have cropped up show there’s a significant audience for high-end portable gaming.
Even Microsoft has admitted its working on its own long-rumored handheld Xbox. While it’s years away from release, and despite Microsoft’s own big push for cloud gaming, the planned hardware likely won’t be cloud-focused. Microsoft Gaming honcho Phil Spencer has said “I think being able to play games locally is really important.”
While the rumors of a new dedicated Sony handheld console are unconfirmed, it’s hard to imagine it would be cloud-only when or if it did arrive. That makes the new direction for PlayStation Portal a whisper in favor of cloud gaming, rather than a full-throated endorsement of it.
Note also how cautious this move is. Sony isn’t going to risk “doing a Stadia” by going whole hog on cloud gaming—it remains merely an added extra, a bonus feature for those already most invested in the PlayStation ecosystem. For those players, it’s likely a welcome move, giving them more to do with their second screen in a manner not too different to streaming from their PS5.
Yet, just as the popularity of PlayStation Portal as a device blindsided Sony, so too could this baby step toward the cloud prove unexpectedly successful. Even with the litany of caveats in place—the limited selection of titles, the restricted functions, the always-online necessity—a $200/£200 Portal and a PS Plus Premium sub is still cheaper, short term, than an actual PS5 (let alone a PS5 Pro), and could prove a gateway drug for many. If this expanded vision for PlayStation Portal finds its niche, the future of gaming could soon look very different.
