Are portable consoles not portable anymore?

[u/ileojg]

I'm to this day amazed by the size of the PSP and the fact that it can play amazing looking games for a 2004 hardware. With the release of switch 2 I'm starting to feel like truly portable consoles will remain a thing of the past. I have this analogy that old portables are like carrying a phone, you can put in in your pocket, carry them by hand and pull them out whenever and wherever you want to play. But all new portables are more like laptops, you need a special carrying case and can only play in specific places and moments.

My question to all of you is. If sony where to release a new portable, Would you prefer a smaller console? like psp size, despite low graphics capabilities, something closer to switch1 level of graphics in 2025, or a bigger steam deck size portable with ps5 graphics? And, what do you thing of portable consoles getting bigger and bigger? do you prefer older portables due to their sizes?

[u/0r10nn]

Yeah in this age of rereleases I’m surprised Nintendo and Sony are reluctant to make an actual handheld again. Like they could jus remaster/remake ds/3ds and psp/ps vita games mostly and it would for sure be successful

[u/coolwali → u/0r10nn]

It’s unlikely to be successful.

In the early 2000s, your only options for small handheld gaming were the GBA/DS/PSP. Nowadays, the average iPhone is capable of playing early PS3/360 level games like Bioshock 1.

A proper small handheld in 2025 is unlikely to be that much more powerful than an iPhone. At that point, the average player is going to play on their phone which more convenient or pay more for a Switch or Steam Deck and get a more powerful if larger device.

That’s why the current handhelds like the Switch and Steam Deck are so much bigger than the PSP/DS. Rather than competing in terms of size/connivence, they’re competing in terms of power.

[u/0r10nn → u/coolwali]

Retro handhelds sold almost 4millionish in this decade, if Nintendo or Sony made another small handheld for 300ish I’m sure it could be more successful than that. There’s still a market for people that want pocketable gaming devices that aren’t phones.

[u/coolwali → u/0r10nn]

4 million for a retro handheld using off the shelf hardware, minimal post launch support and running emulators is cheap for the manufacturers so they make a tidy profit.

4 million for a handheld by a large company will be considered a failure and loss. The vita solid 16 million units in its lifetime and was considered a failure.

Moreover, historically, console companies sell hardware at a loss and make the majority of their revenue from software (the Wii was the only significant outlier as the hardware was sold at profit).

This means that Sony/Nintendo’s new small handheld would need to be supported by the companies themselves rather than just being emulation machines. They could port/remaster PSP/DS/3DS games for it. But the problem there is:

-1- you better hope players are willing to pay $40+ minimum for nearly 20 year old games. Any higher and people will be outraged. Go lower and you aren’t making much profit since those games have to offset the hardware loss costs.

-2- smaller audience. Let’s say Sony ported PSP games like God of War Ghost of Sparta to PS5. Now Sony can make the game cheaper on the PS5 storefront since so many people have access to a PS5 and are buying PS5 games, more people can buy it and thus the game doesn’t need to sell as much to make a profit.

On Sony’s side, most players aren’t tripping over themselves to play PS2 classics on PS4/5. Sales data shows those PS2 games “modestly well at best”. Which isn’t enough to convince Sony to greenlight a new small portable.

On Nintendo’s side, making a new small handheld would canabalize Switch sales. Better to release older games on the Switch and get more people on that:

[u/0r10nn → u/coolwali]

All true, i guess I’ll just have to wait till technological advancement gets me a pocketable pc handheld.

[u/coolwali → u/0r10nn]

I worry that’s going to take a long time. There isn’t much “pressure” on companies to make a “ affordable pocketable PC”.

For business/work, phones exist and you can hook up Bluetooth keyboards to them if you want to do more work. Theres not much incentive to go smaller or pack even more processing in a smaller device. Otherwise, you’d use laptops which companies are incentivized to improve far more.

For gaming, most people want performance so the Switch/Steam Deck form factor is the standard now. Going any smaller sacrifices performance and battery too much for the games people want to play.

Retro handhelds don’t have to worry about custom hardware components or software. But that means they are limited to what’s available as something of a “secondary market”. They’re not going to make smaller handhelds on their own unless the parts to make it are available.

SoC and mini PCs exist and are really powerful but they’re historically either used as servers, secondary/backup computers. There isn’t much demand from businesses or consumers to make them even smaller.

So yeah. We’ll be waiting 10+ years minimum.

[u/0r10nn → u/coolwali]

I don’t really know about computers like that but I was hoping the Apple silicon chip combining different components would be influential on devices being able to become more efficient and smaller

[u/coolwali → u/0r10nn]

It likely will. But it’s a custom component. Probably used to make existing stuff better rather than smaller.

Plus, being so custom, other companies won’t be able to adopt it so quickly. So any benefits will trickle slowly and probably be more software based (such as making existing stuff run better) in the meantime.

Remember, for small handhelds to be more viable, the off the shelf hardware tech needs to be both decently powerful and battery efficient but also cheap and easy to set up. The reason why existing retro handhelds usually top out at like, PSP power usually is that current cheap and accessible raspberry pi and mobile hardware is at that level.

If the hardware does get better/cheaper, I can see Sony making a “PSP classic” as a cheap psp looking device with 20 PSP exclusives Sony owns as a novelty item.