Sony gave a price to its PlayStation Portal. It’s a handheld remote play device that streams the console. They want $200 for it and it’s crazy to me.

Why would you want a handheld streaming device? They already had the backbone controller to stream games to your phone. It doesn’t seem to have sold well but they made another device.

They took a cool feature from a dedicated handheld, and made it the main feature. The PSP and Vita did this and it worked well but they also were the same price.

The Vita was a flop and Sony said that the handheld market was dying. The truth was Sony didn’t market the Vita. You didn’t really see games at E3, online ads or commercials but you’d find out through news sites. The claim the handheld market was dying is crazy, this was when the DS was selling big numbers. Then you had the F2P games on phones making a bunch of cash.

Now Sony has done a semi U turn and made the Portal. I understand if they don’t want to develop handheld games. Then don’t make a handheld device then. Cloud gaming is meh and can get janky. Why do I need to stream my console? It will be novel the first few times you use it but you’ll think why do I have this?

People think Sony making a dedicated handheld would saturate the market. It’s true there are a number of handhelds out there but there’s a difference between them and a Vita 2. The SteamDeck, Lenovo and Asus handhelds are just handheld PCs for gaming. A Vita 2 is different because it will have dedicated content. The PSVR1 or 2 didn’t do this when you have a lot of VR sets out there. They innovated and had exclusives for it. I will say it’s a bad idea to have a handheld, console and VR at the same time.

The only time you see people bragging about cloud gaming are casuals. They will a post about how awesome it is to play on the go, despite it requires WiFi. We’ve already had people praising xCloud about this. But these people look to have gone quiet.

The Portal doesn’t make sense especially at the price. I felt the Backbone being more expensive than a PS5 controller was scammy. The Portal’s price makes more sense but its just a streaming device. What’s the point, when you can stream to phones and PCs? Spending $200 to play your PS5 when a person uses the TV, is like buying that Palm phone that acts as a remote for your phone. If you have PSVR2, just use that.