How Sony could reclaim handheld gaming from Nintendo and the smartphone | Games

A report from Bloomberg this week suggests that Sony is working on a new portable PlayStation device. As someone who still has a PlayStation Vita languishing in my desk drawer because I can’t quite bear to put it in the attic, this is an exciting prospect. It has been almost 13 years since Sony released the Vita, its last portable console, and it’s such a wonder of a thing, with its big crisp screen and dinky little sticks. I wish more people had made games for it – paper-craft adventure Tearaway and topsy-turvy platform-puzzler Gravity Rush remain underrated.

Actually, apart from the lovely and extremely niche Playdate, nobody has bothered to release a dedicated handheld games console in over a decade. Both the Nintendo Switch and Valve’s Steam Deck are hybrids that can be played handheld and connected to a big screen.

There’s a reason for this: firstly, smartphones have snapped up almost the entire market for portable games, offering endless free or cheap games on a device that everybody already has. And secondly: having handheld and home consoles on the market once would split development resources. Only Nintendo was successful enough at selling handhelds to weather several generations of splitting its talent between creating games for the DS and the Wii, or the 3DS and Wii U, which has led to the Switch being a contender for the cleverest business decision of its history.

Sony, meanwhile, always struggled to make enough games for the PlayStation Portable (PSP) or Vita alongside its home PlayStations to make those handhelds an irresistible buy. The 75m-selling PSP was a profitable console despite competing directly with the 150m-selling Nintendo DS (partly thanks to Capcom’s Monster Hunter series, which sold more than 12m copies on the PSP before making the jump to rival platforms). But when the Vita launched in 2011, it was very much into a smartphone world, and it only sold an estimated 15m.

The difference this time is that the machine Sony is working on would reportedly play existing PlayStation 5 games. It seems the idea would be to have portable and home versions of the same console, which can play the same games. Bloomberg suggests that Microsoft has also been working on portable console prototypes, though none of these things may ever make it to market.

Another difference now is that cloud gaming is a thing. I know a lot of people who chiefly used the Vita as a not-very-legal emulator for reams of retro games, because the console was tragically easy to crack. But now, with PlayStation Plus subscriptions offering perfectly legal access to Sony’s treasure trove of a back catalogue, how many people would happily pay for a handheld console that could play most of PlayStation history without having to buy the games? I bet it’s a lot.

Sony has done some handheld hardware experimentation since the Vita was discontinued. At the end of last year it released a strange little device called the PlayStation Portal – essentially a screen spliced into the middle of a PlayStation 5 controller, which lets you stream games from your PS5 to play in your hands. This is of limited utility but it’s a neat thing, and I love Sony’s hardware design – so I really hope we will see a new PlayStation portable in the coming years, even if it won’t have the kind of bite-size bespoke games that older handhelds used to enjoy.

As the Steam Deck has proven, though, handhelds can be a gamechanger for busy people even if they have no exclusive games, because they simply give you more time and opportunity to play. For instance, the only way I managed to finish Persona 4 was by playing it on my vita on the train. With the next portable PlayStation, maybe I might finally manage those last 10 hours of Persona 5.

What to play

Thinking about the old portable PlayStation history has brought several games to mind. There’s LocoRoco, a game about singing blobs, which was revived for a bonus level in this year’s Astro Bot. And I spent more than 100 hours with my index finger curled weirdly over the PSP’s directional buttons, my hand forming a shape that has become known as the Monster Hunter claw.

And there’s Tearaway, Media Molecule’s intimate and brilliant Vita platformer set in a world made of paper. This is the easiest one to try, as there’s a slightly less brilliant PS4 version called Tearway Unfolded available from the PlayStation Store. It’s included with PlayStation Plus, and I’ve just downloaded it to play with the kids this afternoon.

Available on: PS4/5
Estimated playtime: 8 hours

What to read

• Sticking with Sony news, it’s the PlayStation’s 30th anniversary next month. To celebrate, Sony has released a bunch of game soundtracks, a timeline, a quiz and, of course, some stuff you can buy.

• Shuhei Yoshida, the former head of PlayStation Studios and current head of the company’s indie developer initiative, is leaving the company in January after 31 years. I most recently interviewed him last year – he remains one of the friendliest faces in the entire games industry, and one of its most accomplished advocates.

• And Sony apparently intends to buy Kadokawa, the parent company of FromSoftware, makers of Elden Ring, Dark Souls and Armored Core. Is this how we’ll finally get a new Bloodborne?

• Microsoft’s new iteration of Flight Simulator has launched in a bit of a state. If you’ve been considering picking it up, it might be best to give it a few months.

What to click

Question Block

Reader Benjamin asks this week’s question:

“In your latest Pushing Buttons you mention your money is on Shadow of the Erdtree for the ‘game of the year’ award, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts on its inclusion in the first place, being a downloadable expansion and not actually a game unto itself. Does it not set an odd precedent if something that cannot be played standalone can be the best game of the year?”

Gaming award categories have trouble keeping up with how fast video games evolve, whether it’s the Baftas, the Game Awards or the Golden Joysticks. A few years ago, most of them introduced some version of an “ongoing game” category to account for the likes of Fortnite and No Man’s Sky and Minecraft – games that run for years and change frequently. But now that’s become difficult in itself: how much does a game have to change in a given year to qualify? What about something like Cyberpunk 2077, which isn’t a multiplayer game with continual new content, but which did change and improve massively after release? What about remasters? Should downloadable expansions count? And where should games that could fit into two or more genres sit? Every year, there are plenty of releases that challenge the definitions of the categories.

You could spend forever nitpicking over this stuff. My feeling is that anything released in a given year should be eligible for an award if it’s good enough, whether it’s an add-on or expansion to a previous game or not. Shadow of the Erdtree is 30+ hours long and could easily have been a standalone sequel – it’s 10 times as long as some of the indie games nominated in other categories. I would personally find it hard to justify disqualifying it on a technicality, though obviously I would judge it on its own merits rather than those of the base game.

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