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If you were to believe the media hype, you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking the console as a gaming platform had been under attack for several years.
The conversation started when the first Nintendo Switch was released in 2017, and with the subsequent release of the OLED model, the gaming powerhouse that is the iPhone 15 Pro, and now this Playstation Portal, it has only been getting louder.
The Playstation Portal, specifically, has created a very large tremor that has – apparently – shaken the gaming community. Because this is Sony, the masters of console gaming, switching their efforts to a handheld device that can play the same games as your PlayStation 5, only with more freedom and convenience than the PS5 – or any gaming console, for that matter – could ever offer.
So is there a mass rush to purchase the Sony Playstation Portal? Is this yet another nail in the coffin of console gaming, or is it yet another conversation that trails off into nothing? Well, to find out if the Portal does spell the end for console gaming, it’s first important to understand why it could.
Greener Pastures
Console gaming, as a concept, has been in danger ever since Steve Jobs took to a San Francisco stage on January 9th, 2007. It was here that Apple announced the release of the first Apple phone, the iPhone, and it’s fair to say it did quite well.
Having nailed the accessibility of a touch-based interface, and with a 32-bit system chip manufactured by Samsung – cue every Samsung user in the world shouting “hah!” – this became the most popular phone on the market that also offered a solid gaming experience.
Sure, the games available on the first iPhone ranged from Doodle Jump and Temple Run, but that’s beside the point! It could play games that were far more immersive than Snake and Solitaire – and with the growing popularity of the iGaming scene, it proved to be the catalyst for a whole new era of gaming: one that prioritised convenience and accessibility over anything else.
iGaming As A Disruptor
In 2023, the iGaming market is valued at over $65 billion, and this has been noticed by companies like Sony and Microsoft. According to a recent study, over 3 billion gamers around the world use their smartphones as gaming devices, and all of these gamers are growing accustomed to convenience, accessibility, and variety. In this piece that checked and ranked the top payout casinos, one of the common threads between each platform was the number of games on offer – 1,000 to 10,000.
With this in mind, lovers of iGaming can log onto their chosen platform, play any game they want, and do it all within just a few seconds. Quite the contrast considering the average game takes around 6 hours to install on a console before you can play it!
Growing Capabilities
Fans of console gaming, however, will state that it’s the quality that makes console gaming good. While it might take several hours to install a new AAA game, the reward you get is a truly immersive experience, with great gameplay, beautiful graphics, and a well-developed storyline – well, unless you’ve installed Bethesda’s Starfield.
Because the smartphone had not exactly been delivering that, there hasn’t been too much concern that consoles would die out. But then the iPhone 15 Pro happened, and once again, Apple was responsible for another shake-up. On the latest iPhone model, gamers have the ability to play AAA games like Resident Evil: Village and upcoming releases like Assassins Creed: Mirage without having to plug in a single HDMI cable. The phone itself is a gaming powerhouse, proving the capabilities of the smartphone to not only offer convenience and accessibility – as they do with the iGaming scene – but quality and efficiency as well.
Playstation Portal As A Final Nail
Then, of course, we get to the release of Sony’s Playstation Portal. This is a handheld device that can stream all of your favourite games that were designed for the console. With solid battery life, a large 8-inch screen, a nearly identical DualSense controller, and a processor that achieves pinpoint streaming performance, this offers gamers nearly everything that their console offers, but on the go.
According to recent statistics, it’s doing incredibly well, having already sold more units than the Xbox Series X/S in Spain, and it is now sold out nearly everywhere you look. With console sales – especially Xbox Series X/S – on the decline in 2023, it seems almost inevitable that gaming is going to move predominantly into our pockets.
The Playstation Portal is another cog in the machine that has switched handheld gaming from “standby” to “go”, but it is a sizable cog that may end up providing the final spin. In actuality, the end of console gaming has been spelled for well over a decade now. It just took the PlayStation Portal to provide the full stop.