I don’t understand what market the PlayStation Portal was designed for.
You’re basically paying £200 for a DualSense controller MacGyver’d on a tablet screen that can only remote play PS5 games or stream from PSNow. There are both cheaper and better options which support not just Sony’s ecosystem but also other gaming platforms.
Not to mention that cloud gaming in general just sucks.
Cloud gaming doesn’t suck though. As long as you have good Internet, it’s awesome. I have several thousand hours with cloud gaming and couldn’t have played any of those games otherwise, very rarely have any issues.
Same here og 2020 stadia user here although I wouldn’t necessarily call cloud gaming ideal
pc gaming is the way to go nowadays with Cheap games on steam and free games on epic games sometimes on gog plus playing online is free and nowadays you can build yourself a very cheap rx 480/570 miners are trying get rid of there stock i5 4450/i7 3770 pc for very cheaply pair that with a 60gb ssd and above for a boot drive and a 1tb hdd and your gaming
Cloud gaming doesn’t suck. You can literally play Half Life Alyx on a Quest from a cloud PC and it works great. This all depends on your location and cloud pc of course.
I was under the impression it was a lot more than $200, but that still seems costly for what it does. For $100 more you can get an AYN Odin 2 which does a hell of a lot more stuff for the price.
I mean it’s an 8in 1080p touch screen display at 60hz, the panel is probably around $60, the hardware is probably like a pi zero so $20, and a controller $70. So just on hardware this is probably around $120 after taking into account supply chain discounts. Then, manufacturing costs, and they probably don’t even have that high of a profit margin on the device. Add in a $100 for the actually chip set and yeah you get more features but it’s not that crazy imo. Just a niche market for sure.
Adding “vita compatibility” would require including a psvita inside it. As well as extra inputs on the back. All for games people didn’t actually ever want. You can however play (some) ps1 and psp games on the thing via the ps5
Hardware-wise, vita is nothing special. It’s just an arm cortex device, which means Sony will have much easier time making the runtime works on newer arm processor. They don’t even need to port the whole os, just the runtime would be enough. If a bunch of volunteer can make vita runtime from scratch on their own free time (and managed to get various Android games running on vita runtime too), there is no reason Sony which have access to the source code can’t do it with less time.
No need for extra touchpad in the rear either. Vita TV didn’t have it and work fine without it too.
it’s not a “nothing special” device, it literally has a psp encoded into the soc package…
It’s nothing special anymore today because current arm processors are fast enough to fully emulate PSP, unlike the time when vita was still in development.
this is just flat out incorrect, a huge amount of games just don’t work on the vita tv because of the lack of touch interactions
Only a few dozen out of hundreds of vita titles, and mostly due to the lack of touchscreen, not the lack of the rear touchpad. Most vita titles that use the rear touchpad only use it as a workaround for the lack of R2/L2 buttons (and many of them already patched to recognize R2/L2 on vita tv), which the portal has. If the portal has vita support, it’ll support more titles than vita tv simply because it has a touchscreen.
I genuinely just don’t understand the value proposition of this handheld. It’s remote play only, with no standalone capabilities, that also only works with the PS5. You could use your existing phone, and receive exactly the same product. Or if you’re committed to buying a handheld, you could absolutely get a Steam Deck, still receive the remote functionality, but also have a system that can not only play your PC games, but play like 5 generations of console games from the past
It’s good for a niche market, people who have multiple people living in the house where they have to share a TV, but don’t need to share the PlayStation. In that one niche it makes sense to me
I think that niche might be bigger and more normal than you think it is.
Why a handheld if 99% of people don’t want to use it outside of the house and just want a home-portsble
Edit to just point out how disappointed I am in this community lately. It’s become all the things that made me dislike reddit. The circlejerk here is just as strong, and all the discussions we had initially are gone in favor of updooting my opinion and downdooting everyone else.
Agreed, people on here can’t seem to understand how this product could be successful? Every post about it on here has the same upvoted comments about how people should get a Steam Deck instead. If someone comments about why they like it or are happy with it, it gets downvoted.
Personally I probably won’t ever buy one of these but to act like your opinion about something as unimportant as a this is better than everyone else’s screams of reddit to me. Why not just let people be happy with their purchase?
Yeah it was odd to read that description being presented as an oddity - that sounds like most households I know. If you have a wife, kids, or roommate and don’t enjoy being holed up in your own room the whole time you play (and those sharing your house don’t just want to watch you game all night) then in house streaming is a huge boon.
I PC game, but most of my gaming is done on the couch, streamed onto my phone. I’ve been very tempted to buy a dedicated streaming device lately to avoid draining my phone battery while playing
It’s an oddity because there’s already multiple devices in most homes that can remote play, paying for a device that can ONLY remote play is about the stupidest waste of money I can think of when I have two phones, a PC, a laptop and a tablet that can all do the same thing. Hell if you plug in an ethernet cable the PC and laptop well do it better.
It could have been a cool device if you could use it to stream from PS+/Now, but you can’t. It could be cool if it had like a vita in it or something so you could play vita games, but it didn’t. It’s an idea with potential, but they shoved all that potential in a bin and instead released something that’s completely useless unless it’s connected to your PS5. What a waste.
It’s completely useless, unless you want to play your ps5 in the same kind of way you play a nintendo switch. In which case it works super well.
it turns out a lot of people want that. People could stick a laptop on their lap and get out a controller and play nintendo switch on that too, but that’s a pain. people just want a thing they can pick up. and they are happy to have it. even if you are angry about it.
There’s multiple devices that allow you to play your PS5 like a Switch, and they all do more.
I’m not angry, you can have opinions about things you’re not angry about. I’m disappointed that Sony charged as much as possible for the bare minimum again, just a lack of ambition and abundance of cost.
we all think that it costs too much don’t worry, but also you should understand the value proposition it has. people are paying “too much” because it serves a real function.
no, we don’t want to hogtie a controller to a phone, we want the nice ergonomics of a playstation controller all built together. it’s worth understanding that value.
Edit to just point out how disappointed I am in this community lately. It’s become all the things that made me dislike reddit. The circlejerk here is just as strong, and all the discussions we had initially are gone in favor of updooting my opinion and downdooting everyone else.
This has been Lemmy wide and growing substantially. I’m put off and disappointed as well.
Both of you had too lofty dreams for social media. Reddit itself used to be like that too, by convincing themselves that this sort of idealistic attitude could last, or that “circlejerk”, that is, the influence of majority opinion, was ever not present. This is a place for discussion among regular people, not a philosophical symposium of specialists, as if those environments were truly neutral and universally accepting either.
As platforms grow beyond the most invested niche users, most people will not put more energy into any discussion than a general agree or disagree. The tendency of downvotes is always to become a disagree button, no matter how much one might insist otherwise. In such a semi-anonymous platform, a modicum of politeness is already an achievement.
Really, if you do want to have such a perfectly open and supportive discussion group you might want to select particular people to create a small forum. But by doing that, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you won’t escape some form of circlejerk.
The good people seem to have left, maybe as a result of the reddit people coming in?
Or maybe as a result of poor moderation. The way how other instances defederated from lemmy.world comes to mind. Compared to the other instances I am in, this one seems more belligerent, and that’s not a matter of up or downvotes.
I have to admit I did come from reddit, but if there was a moment of pure, 100% jerk free discussion here, I must have entirely missed it. Then again I was on reddit before people started saying circlejerk took over, and in retrospect that was an entirely idealized memory. If anything, it overrepresented certain viewpoints far more before the “circlejerk took over”
Dunno why you stretched that point across so many words. I’m not speaking on just downvotes. There’s trigger words that will almost universally get you comment bombed along with being downvoted. We filtered everyone of the same mind from Reddit and brought them here. To the point that Reddit could theoretically be better now.
Most of my games are on PlayStation. The Steam Deck is clearly the more powerful and capable device, but it is also more expensive and I have no need for any of the extra features. I love the ergonomics of the PS Portal (even though it looks silly), the haptics, the huge screen, and it all comes with a seamless integration into the PlayStation ecosystem. Plus there is no need to take the case off of my phone every time I want to play it unlike the Backbone.
It’s definitely not for everyone but they call it a DadStation for a reason ☺️.
You are right. Even though I’ve had an absolute blast using the PS Portal daily ever since i got it I have made the difficult decision to return it because the internet told me that it’s actually not good.
Prehaps an ayn loki zero might be up your valley as its a full fledged budget steamdeck type pc for the same price as a ps portal this might be perfect for you as you could have playstations desktop streaming app installed and some desktop games that’ll run on the meager loki zeros hardware I hear it does a good job emulating games upto ps2 games
Honestly when it drops to $150 or so, I’m in. Mostly for these same reasons. I use the PS5 on the good TV, but if I wanna be in the room with my partner while they watch a trash reality show, and keep working on my game, this is perfect. At $200, I’ll stick with remote play on Android and a Bluetooth controller, but the Portal seems better for this use case. So when the price is low enough… Sure.
Funny how they pretend to ask a question, then downvote you when you give them an answer they don’t like.
It’s also half the price of the SD with a bigger resolution screen (bUt mUh oLEd). I pick it up, press like 2 buttons, and I’m playing in 20 sec. I was happy to pay for the convenience, have been using it a lot since I got it the day after the release.
Lol, would love to hear why on earth this is downvoted - guess we’re in full on reddit mode and just downvoting everything that isn’t exactly what I think lol
Get some glue and make a holder or something. Bigger screen? Use a tablet, laptop, or PC that you’ve probably already got. £200 for a device that can’t do anything on its own? Stop bending over for them.
Yeah, and convenience used to be putting multiple different functions in one device. Now apparently it’s more convenient to pay £200 for a device that can literally only do one thing instead of using the many other devices you already own to conveniently do the same thing.
No I’m disappointed they didn’t make a worthwhile device. I would’ve loved this if it had some worthwhile additions, but it’s an overpriced screen with a controller attached, useless without your PS5 connected to it wirelessly.
Even just streaming from PS+/Now would’ve done it for me, but “here’s a way to play games you already own that are installed on the console you already own, but it costs £200 and you could do the same thing with many of the devices you already own, some of which may have an ethernet connection, so they’re better at it” just feels like a waste.
Hopefully it’ll get hacked and they’ll get gamepass streaming on it or something.
It’s just a $200 pro controller with a screen. I don’t think it’s gonna have a massive market, but for what it is, it’s not entirely terrible. Not everyone has a phone with a large screen so upgrading to a $1k phone is not a move they can make, but $200 for what’s basically an extra controller with an 8in display is not terrible just very niche.
Edit: If you just want a screen controller combo for streaming, there are a myriad of android based options littered in the space for nearly the same cost and similar screen size.
Don’t get me wrong I’m sure it’ll find a small market, it just could’ve had a bigger one with comparatively little effort and now the device it could’ve been will never exist. I had hopes for this as I’d expected it to stream from Now, but it just doesn’t for no reason beyond “CBA” really.
The thing is they are only targeting that small market for PS5 gamers, they don’t want to compete in the handheld market and possibly loose those customers who would be happy with just a ps5 remote play experience vs a better more expensive device. I get it, they don’t have to have as many competitors and it makes it slightly cheaper versus the non dedicated competitors giving them a niche area to sell to.
Yeah, and convenience used to be putting multiple different functions in one device
Yeah, I always use my Swiss army knife in the kitchen, way more convenient than using my chef’s knife, because it combines so many functions.
Convenience is often a tool that does one thing and does it really well. Combining multiple functions almost always complicates things.
I used to own a combination microwave/oven/steamer/grill that I replaced with a simple microwave, as I rarely if ever used any of those other functions. Guess which one is more convenient to use?
Compare a simple black and white laser printer with an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax combo an tell me which one is more convenient.
I’d say the printer/scanner/fax combo is more convenient the second you either need to scan something or find yourself in the 1980s and need to send a fax.
It’s kinda absurd to think Sony can’t put more than one feature into this £200 device without over complicating it. There’s no reason it couldn’t stream from PS Now, all the hardware it needs is already there. It’s just the bare minimum and much of the potential was squandered.
They do sell like $5 phone clips for controllers now a days as some mobile games are adding more controller support. But if for you an extra inch or two of screen real estate for the display is worth $200 then that’s your position, it just seems like the market share for that will be pretty damn niche. Like the nvidia shield I don’t expect it to be around for to long so if you do want this you better get one while they make em but know once the ps5 is done support for this will die out as well.
My phone is nearly a 7in screen, I could Bluetooth connect a Playstation controller and have the exact same functionality, using the hardware I already have. I get that if you don’t have a phone with a bigger screen then this becomes more of a proposition as getting a newer device with a larger screen is gonna be north of $1k USD, so spending $200 to get a portable display and extra controller in a sense is not that bad value wise. I do see where people are seeing it being wasteful as other devices are capable just not at the same level, the only thing I’m wondering is how big is the market of people who wouldn’t rather get a $5 phone holder for their ps5 controller and just use their phone. I see a couple people in this thread here but if most realized they could get a similar experience for $5 for a plastic phone clip would this really look as enticing?
Correct but that screen real-estate isn’t the biggest issue as you generally have the phone and controller fairly close to your eyes, at an optimal viewing distance. Plus, I can stream up to 4k on my device or 1080p at 120fps if I wanted to stream from my pc. Think monitor vs TV gaming. Viewing distance is much more important than screen size on its own.
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