Handheld gaming seems to be a new focus area for the gaming industry which was kinda sparked by the popularity of the Nintendo Switch and pushed on by surprisingly succes of Valve’s Steam Deck. We’re seeing more and more handhelds, and it looks like Sony is even working on a new one too. But since it’s Sony we’re talking about, there are a lot of quirks and not so much features.
A couple of days ago relatively new gaming site Insider Gaming spread the rumor that Sony was working on a new handheld internally called the Q Lite. According to the site people working on the machine are saying it will mostly be a companion for the PS5. That means you get PS Vita-like functionality and stream games from your console to your handheld.
The reactions to this news are mostly “what? why would Sony make this apparatus? It seems completely useless.” And I agree with that. I had a Vita, and I used it to stream games from my PlayStation to the handheld, but to buy a completely new machine just for this purpose seems like a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly. I’d definitely need it to play games on the go. I’m not using a handheld on the couch in front of the TV to which the PS5 is connected, just so I can play PS5-games without turning on the TV…
But before we completely dismiss the Q Lite before it even comes to market, there is a bit more to the rumor than Insider Gaming made it out to be. The part of the rumor that said the handheld wouldn’t be able to do cloud gaming, just doesn’t make any sense in the bigger picture of the direction Sony is moving in. t seems the machine should be able to play streaming games from the cloud too. Just like you can do with Microsoft’s Game Pass to pretty much every device whit an internet browser.
Sony was one of the first companies that dabbled in streaming games, but quickly dismissed it as not usable because of latency and other issues. But now cloud gaming seems to have a future, with Microsoft betting big on it. So Sony can’t be left behind. To catch up, the company figures it needs a team of 22 new engineers who get the cloud initiative going again. So it’s starting to hire them.
When you combine the rumor of the Q Lite with the hiring of new engineers, the handheld starts to make a little bit more sense. Streaming on a mobile device can be done with the 5G internet speeds of today, but I’d be saying it still wouldn’t be good enough. No mobile connection is really stable enough to guarantee lag-free gaming.
But from a hardware point of view it makes more sense. When you stream, you don’t need a big powerful processor and a lot of memory, which are pricy components. And make developing a handheld technically difficult to make. Make the Q Lite streaming-only essentially ensures Sony could make it relatively cheap and therefore an enticing buy.
But even with streaming from the cloud, the new Sony handheld is a typically Sony thing to build. You could say the streaming from either the PS5 or the cloud be done with an app on any mobile device already on the market. That way you could probably grow the player base with non-Sony gamers, and maybe even get them to buy a PS5 in the long run. But Sony has always had issues with it’s own content to other platforms.
To make matters even more unclear with the Q Lite, PS Remote Play is an app for other devices, like iPhones and iPads, which make streaming games from you PS5 or PS4 to the handheld device already possible. Even over the internet. So why THE F*** would Sony make a device that competes with all the handheld devices in the market already with a that amount of limited functionality.
And with that notion, the Q Lite starts to make Sony-sense. Only the cloud could make this thing happen because: why make your cloud streaming efforts available to as many people as possible to make as much money from it as possible -as Microsoft does- when you can make them buy a device to make use of it and make extra profit from the hardware sales and keep all your content exclusively locked to your devices at the same time?
Seems like a no-brainer right. You potentially still get millions of people who want to use your cloud service, and millions of hardware sales, while not having to share anything with anybody who is not Sony. As a bonus, it keeps all the PlayStation exclusive games, exclusive to the platform. That’s some big brain thinking only Sony can do.
But in all fairness, the Q Lite seems to be a product of the times when people where swimming in pandemic-cash. A product from an economy we are not living in anymore. As the rumors stands, it just doesn’t make sense asking people to buy a machine that only does streaming from a console which isn’t cheap to begin with. Especially when you know everybody has a perfectly capable streaming machine in their pocket, for which they only need to download the PS Remote Play app. It’s called a smartphone, and Sony even makes them.
Maybe they should look into that part of the business and make a Q Lite-phone. Just like the N-Gage Nokia made back in day. But then again, specialized gaming phones don’t do so well in the smartphone market.
Ah well, maybe Sony’s focus groups will kill the Q Lite and we’ll never see it again. Or the rumor was just a weirdly designed PR-stunt, which major outlets picked up because it was a slow news day anyway… And if that’s the case, I’m fine with it, because it took me out of the barrage of AI news for a second.
PS. The rumors made me dig out my good old PSP, and I’ve been enjoying the hell out of it. Even though the battery was about to explode on me, it was that swollen. My PSP is wired for the moment.