3 days Ago By Derek Strickland
Sony gives a pretty clear explanation on why the PlayStation Portal isn't natively running games like the PS Vita or Nintendo Switch. The $199 PlayStation Portal is a curious device--it started out as only supporting Remote Play, meaning gamers already had to have a PlayStation 5 in order to actually play anything on the handheld. It was essentially a receiver-only device, although Google's engineers did hack a Portal to run a PSP emulator .
Now Sony is bringing cloud streaming to the PS Portal via a new beta program. This allows gamers to just buy a $199 PS Portal and play PS5 games through the cloud all without having to own an actual console. But many have wondered why Sony took this route in the first place? In a word, it all comes down to profits ( the PS Portal is very profitable ), and creating a new dedicated handheld platform would cost a lot of time and money.
In a recent interview with Famitsu , PlayStation Platform Business Group CEO Hideaki Nishino discussed why the PS Portal only streams games and doesn't actually play them. Essentially, Sony wanted to make it easy for developers and not complicate game development any more than necessary. Creating a PS Vita 2 would require devs to scale their games for low-power devices, not to mention new SoC designs and dedicated hardware to beef up the handheld's internals.
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