On December 28th 2024, Hedeaki Nishino the CEO of the Platform Business Group at SIE talked with the Japenese gaming media outlet Famitsu about several topics of the PlayStation ecosystem.
During this interview, they discussed the development and goal of the newly released PS5 Pro, and the Famitsu reporter brought up the concern of the higher price of the new console.
At $699, while the console can be considered well worth the price for those looking for more performance, it does nothing to make the PS5 more accessible starting at $374 US compared to the Xbox Series S price of $299.
To this, the SIE CEO responded that they are aware that they need a different price range to increase their customer base to a larger demographic.
When asked to further elaborate on what is considered, he pointed to the beta that has been released on the PlayStation Portal that allows users to stream select games to the device directly from the cloud. At $199 US, the PS Portal stands at a very competitive price.
One of the reasons they chose to support the Portal is that it doesn’t need any extra work from game developers. They wanted as little effort as possible to be required from studios to support any platforms added alongside the PS5. While the PS5 Pro is easy to accommodate with its higher specs, the restrictions of a less powerful platform would have proven problematic.
Recently, Black Myth: Wukong director Feng Ji explained on Chinese social media platform Weibo that the reason they have not yet launched the game on Xbox is due to the limited 10 Gb of shared memory of the Xbox Series S which makes it difficult to reach parity as required by Microsoft.
A similar situation happened when Larian had to reach an agreement with Xbox to release the game on their platform with the split-screen coop feature disabled on the more affordable console.
Nintendo on the other hand has a new Switch handheld on the way that is supposed to offer performance that will make it a more suitable device to gain support of multiplatform games. There are already reports that Xbox is working on bringing Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Flight Simulator to the Switch 2 as early as 2025, something that would not have been possible on the earlier version of the handheld platform.
Sony has expressed that it is a priority for them to make life as easy as possible for game creators. The PS5 lead architect Mark Cerny explained in his PS5 Pro technical seminar (link to the video directly at the segment he explains this) that when building the PS5 Pro, some RDNA3 features were left out so that developers wouldn’t need to build a version of the game from the ground up for the PS5 Pro. Hideaki Nishino also mentions multiple times during his Famitsu interview that this was a priority when weighing in on the future of their devices.
In a world where connecting to a stable internet access anywhere through WiFi or 5G, and with the increasing availability of low latency satellite internet, a streaming handheld like the Portal that gives no compromise on performance and sports a very ergonomic design is a very logical choice for Sony to offer a budget friendly option that does not depend on the support of a costly and risky dedicated library of games.
My conclusion on this statement from SIE Hideaki Nishino is that I have very little doubt that Sony will continue their support of the PS Portal to make it its very own flagship PlayStation handheld platform where you will be able to play all of your games without the need of a console at home.
Interesting comment from Sony, but why is the info on Xbox and Nintendo even in this? It isn’t relevant and the article comes across as a fanboy post.