Sony confirms its working on a new Playstation portable, codenamed Project Q | Hacker News Reader

Sony confirms its working on a new Playstation portable, codenamed Project Q

overkill.wtf

48 pointsbrandrick79 comments

I still have a Japan model PS Vita that was manufactured circa 2018. It is unfortunate the hardware is stuck in 2014 (including the bundled WebKit!!). Through a Vita->SD converter and a jailbreak, I have nearly 40 games in this device. It has great battery life and is truly portable. I also recall last year a few new releases made for the Vita in the Japan PS Store, but due to the SSL certs in the Vita, you need to purchase the games on a PS4 device then transfer to the handheld, or something like that. Very unfortunate because from every angle it seems like deliberate sabotage by Sony, and the platform is basically dead, but not to me. I'm still yet to finish all of the games I have on the device.

If Sony releases a new handheld, I hope they took lessons on how poorly they managed the Vita.

Well this device is just a PS Remote Client, literally nothing else. I would love to see a new PSP/Vita-like device, but this isn't it.

are you sure? I was hoping it'd be an android device when I saw it announced, but I'm guessing they don't want MSs xcloud thing to work on it.

Do you mean the software is stuck in 2014?

Hardware and system software. Blue Reflection is a game that really pushes the hardware to its limits; when there are heavy particle effects in the game, you can discern a steep drop in frame rate. This game was released March 2017.

There is also space limitations in play. A lot of assets are seemingly missing. In many cases, a character will have a dialog, but you do not hear their voice. I've never played this game elsewhere, so I don't know if this is correct, but it wouldn't surprise me, since the game is at most 2 GB on the Vita, and storing PCM audio is expensive. (I doubt AAC is used, despite hardware decoding available, because you will have to take into account encoder delay, remainder samples, and other annoying things in order to synchronize speech with character movement. Feel free to disprove me!).

in my world of 8K and UHD/4K videos, audio is essentially a rounding error. For dialog delivered during game play, seems like they could get away with 8bit 22kHz mono and really drop the file sizes of PCM. at that point, audio is just an after thought except when you're trying to squeeze every damn bit out of a finite amount of space on a disc or filesize limit by a distribution platform.

They stopped letting you add funds on the Vita so you have to do it on the web or another device. I don't think the PS4 store has Vita Games, the PS3 did but it actually supported transfering to and from the Vita whereas the PS4 never did. So you still need to make purchases on the Vita itself (or I guess a PS3).

I had all my Vita games on my PS3 so I could transfer them rather than slowly redownload them on it itself but Sony BROKE that functionality when they forced two factor authentication. The worst bit is they couldn't even be bothered to offer a sensible error message like "this feature isn't supported anymore" you just get some cryptic error number.

I loved the Vita but I'm never giving Sony money for a handheld again.

I just came across my Vita a week ago after it sat dormant for two years and decided to go ahead and jailbreak it. Seems like the homebrew scene is still pretty active on there. They're even writing wrappers for Android games, like GTA 3 San Andreas, effectively bringing over games that never existed onto the platform.

Still a bit of a learning curve figuring out how to get it all working after that though, but it still seems to be a popular platform for homebrew. There's enough happening for people to have monthly videos on new apps, games, and updates.

I might even port one of my small puzzle games to it if I get a hang on homebrew development sometime, although that's probably a ways out still.

Have you considered getting a GPD Win 4? It's the same form factor and very modern PC specs.

Cloud only, what a mistake..

I want a dedicated Sony handheld like a proper PSP/PSVITA with its own games including PS1/2/3/4 PSP/VITA games..

They should do like the Nintendo Switch, not like Microsoft and their cloud only devices..

I don't think this will sell very well.. that's a shame because that'll give wrong market signal..

This whole event.. I feel like somebody wanted to sabotage it, I can't believe that's what they have to offer!

I think 'its own games' is the problem. It would require a lot of investment to be able to support it. Which is what they didn't do with the Vita. The competitors like the Switch and Steam Deck deck don't split the game library they have to support into two separate libraries.

The dedicated handheld market is just another of the devices replaced by smartphones. The Vita and 3DS generation combined sold about half as many as the Nintendo DS alone. So an investment into those games may not get a return.

I don't buy that narrative, Nintendo Switch sales beating both PS5/XBOX, despite being already 6yo, is a clear signal about what the customers want, it could be a heaven for indies and AA games, games you see on the Switch, most of them are also on Steam..

Not every games are AAA/Photorealistic

Check for yourself, https://store.steampowered.com/, all the games from "news&trending" would run on the Switch with no problems at all

I'm not talking about computing power? I'm talking about libraries.

The Steam Deck is appealing because you can play those new&trending games right? A new system that doesn't have new&trending games is not appealing to users and gets no users. And a system with no users gets no developers. That's why the Vita failed right?

Look at before the Switch: Nintendo are dividing their attention between a failed WiiU and a 3DS library. The Switch worked by combining the libraries instead of splitting effort in a way that neither library ever gets enough games that users want to play on it.

Sony would have to spend a lot of time to build such a library for a new handheld. Or they can do what Steam Deck did and make it compatible with your other library. I don't think the hardware is there for a portable PS5, so they have to stream.

The Switch library was a fresh thing. It left behind the software of the DS and 3DS family because it didn't have dual screens or 3D.

There's no reason why it can't be done.

I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying it's not worth the investment. Nintendo needed to do it because it's their only console, so their stakes are much higher.

As a customer and developer, you know Nintendo were going to keep supporting it because otherwise they're out of the console business. Can you trust Sony to keep supporting a new handheld when they've already dropped support for a handheld once with the Vita? Sony need a bigger investment in games and developers to build that trust compared to Nintendo. Doing that would just take money they could be investing in the other console while adding confusion to the libraries: "Why is this Playstation game not coming to MY Playstation?"

Consumers didn't struggle in understanding PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita in how the differed versus home consoles.

Consumers didn't struggle in understanding Nintendo Wii compatibility versus the Nintendo DS et al.

With that said, it's a different era. I think that even Nintendo realize that a Switch successor would need to be pretty special to succeed versus just making controllers for smartphones and making games available via the respective stores. Sony already make games available on PC.

Joy-Con-compatible smartphone cases probably make sense. However, that then opens up some degree of fragmentation and lack of consistency of experience.

Why would you want a streaming handheld?

The places you would want to use a handheld (trains, planes, &c) all tend to have unreliable or no wifi.

As a dad, because my kid is using the TV.

I second that!

I use handhelds plenty just because I like the formfactor. Also sometimes the TV is in use, or I want to play in a different room.

So I can play tucked in bed. Most of my ps5 gameplay has been that 1 hour window of time before I fall asleep

You do you, but I'd be remiss as an old fart to not mention how you may want to research and/or practice different sleep hygiene over time, cuz tbh that shit will you faster than a pack of smokes a day.

As someone who has been reading/playing games in bed since early teens into my 30s - I think I'm ok. Not sure what you mean about it having worse effects on your health than a pack of smokes a day - in what way exactly? I've never had any trouble falling asleep, games or no games, put my head down and I'm out in 30 seconds or less, one of those people I guess.

You're getting quite close to the age that presbyopia is going to set in, which will make gaming in bed or any other near-vision activity significantly more difficult and even painful. Happens more when you're tired or in darker light, aka in bed.

You haven't felt it til now because the muscles in our eyes are strong enough in our teens to 30s, but know it's coming! I'm in my early 40s and it set in during covid, plus I got way more nearsided (-2) after having stable vision for 20 years. No way I'd game in bed now or put a device even somewhat close to my face. Best to adjust your habits before you start feeling it!

Not everybody is affected by presbyopia. A lot of people are, but not everybody.

It’s probably a coping mechanism for not being able to stop thinking on command. I guess this is why meditation can be useful?

Funny that you mention that because it took me over 25 years of variable sleep quality to realize that if I stop thinking for just a short moment, my brain starts hypnagogic_hallucinations.exe and that's usually the last thing I remember

Easy to learn, hard to master

This is kind of a shame. I was hoping from the headline that it would be a PSP successor. Instead, they're coming out with something already accomplished by this: https://playbackbone.com/playstation I own this and it sucks because the connection always cuts out. I'm considering feeding a direct ethernet cable to my PS5 so that it could hopefully work? But improving your home network is a lot to ask of consumers IMO

I remember when the PSP came out, and we thought it would have been cool if it had a phone in it, as the form factor was pretty close to landline phone headsets. other people complained it was too big for that purpose. hindsight and all, but it's funny that it's close in size to some phablets.

Too bad it's not a Steam Deck or ROG Ally competitor, to enable native games to be played on device..

A better question is when will Sony support Vulkan instead of constant NIH. Nintendo does.

To be fair, only the Switch does. Xbox One/Series Families and PS4/5 do not. It’s not just a “Sony thing”.

Vulkan also isn't the primary API on the Switch, it has a proprietary API called NVN which is apparently what most games actually use. It having OpenGL and Vulkan is a more of a bonus feature, probably taking advantage of Nvidia's already existing driver implementation, rather than Nintendo going all-in on the open standards.

Nintendo aren't happy about that and they want to avoid this split. They've been working on some Vulkan extensions to address uses cases they need. So they'll likely double down on that and drop that NVN down the road to avoid reinventing the wheel.

See: https://www.khronos.org/blog/you-can-use-vulkan-without-pipe...

I agree, given general Nintendo's reputation it's kind of unusual. But that's what we should be seeing from Sony and MS as well instead of their NIHs.

https://mynintendonews.com/2022/03/01/nvidia-leaks-mention-n...

They're going to the trouble of developing NVN2 for their next system, it doesn't sound like they're doubling down on Vulkan.

Interesting. May be it's "right hand doesn't know what left hand is doing" kind of situation. Some developers there want to advance Vulkan while others are hung on NIH. It's not uncommon in huge companies.

Or may be it's just a longer term effort and they need to keep updating NVN until Vulkan improvements are sufficient to stop doing it.

The Vulkan post mentions this:

> VK_EXT_shader_object represents the culmination of years of work to bring Vulkan developers ever more powerful and easier-to-use ways to manage shaders and state. We’re proud of what we have achieved and can’t wait to see what developers can do with this extension once you get your hands on it.

So it sounds like they've been working on that for a while. They also mention some pending items like ray tracing in that context. In the end, constantly reinventing the wheel is just pointless and wastes resources. So it makes sense for them to focus on Vulkan.

This is interesting. As a father in a house with only one PS5, I hope it allows concurrent play. It would suck to be on a trip, and not able to play cause my dudes are watching Youtube at the house.

I didn't watch the Sony showcase but I wouldn't be surprised if they're working on a "PS5 as a service" thing like xbox has.

is there no ps5 games on psnow? I thought they'd stayed current since they launched it.

It will not. It's literally just a PS Remote Client, it's been around since PS3 times and you can try it now with your phone - it just streams the screen of your PS5 to your device of choosing, nothing more complex than this. It's just a dedicated device that can only do this and nothing else. I guess the integrated Dual Sense is nice, but ultimately not that different to a Dual Sense + phone holder setup, probably somewhat more comfortable to hold.

Everyone keeps trying to sell us streaming gaming, and I'm sorry, it just is bad.

It is too laggy and too disconnected for me to enjoy it. It constantly cuts out and makes me reconnect. No thanks.

Yeah, the recent Logitech G Cloud (pushed as an Xbox streaming device) was met with rather lukewarm reviews. I can see this getting a similar reception.

Unlike Logitech, Sony has an interest in pushing people towards the ecosystem. I could see it being sold at a loss to compete with other portables like the Switch.

This device doesn't compete with the Switch, It's only to stream PS5 games over the Wifi, they even categorize it as "accessory", not "console"

I think you have interest in a competing company for being this much disingenuous

"Take a sneak peek at new accessories revealed at today’s Showcase — the Project Q device for playing games installed on your PS5 and streamed over WiFi"

https://youtu.be/9PkeVRJBkIE

https://blog.playstation.com/2023/05/24/playstation-showcase...

That doesn't stop them from competing. They both fall under an umbrella term of "portable entertainment". Which could include even phones with Netflix.

By your logic Netflix and Blockbuster didn't compete because one rents DVDs and the other streams tv shows. In the same way the actual goal of both of these is to get a movie into your face, both a Switch and this Playstation portable do the same with games.

You think like Microsoft, you want to skip an evolution and go straight to the cloud ignoring the market, the infrastructure, the cost, players sentiment and the UX, Google Stadia tried and failed btw

arcade -> console -> handheld -> cloud

First of all the device:

This is not a Playstation Portable, so you refuse to understand.. this is a local Wifi display with a controller, this is akin to the WiiU's gamepad, not a Gameboy, not a 3DS, not a Switch (PS5 is the WiiU, Playstation Q is the WiiU's gamepad, it's called: remote play)

> By your logic Netflix and Blockbuster didn't compete because one rents DVDs and the other streams tv shows.

I never said that, you project

> In the same way the actual goal of both of these is to get a movie into your face, both a Switch and this Playstation portable do the same with games.

No, a movie doesn't require your input, a game does, and is limited by both network quality, stability and latency

With movies you can work around that with buffering, caching or offline downloading, wich is what Netflix do, so that's a natural evolution over renting a DVD, the infrastructure allows it, and people demand it, you just improved distribution at this point

You can't with games, so you are ignoring the player UX in your equation, the goal is to play games, not watch them

Many have tried cloud gaming, recently Logitech/Microsoft with the G Cloud full of GamePass Ads, it didn't sell well

I'm not idiot, I understand cloud gaming is the natural evolution of gaming, however it's not there yet, and it cost more than what players are willing to pay, and it's going to get worse with AI on the cloud (gpu cloud price are already insane)

Read the comments on the various social media about that PlayStation Q, people are expressing their disappointment and wishes for a proper handheld

It's no wonder Nintendo is alone in the market and is selling more Switches than both PS5/XBOX combined, analysts in the west got it all wrong, hence why XBox sells 4x less consoles than both Sony/Nintendo

So i reiterate, this device is not trying to compete with the Switch, also the rumors were calling the device: "Playstation Q Lite", so I'm pretty sure a proper handheld will get announced at a later date, perhaps for the next gen, to, this time, compete with Switch 2

The proper natural evolution of gaming is: pragmatism, eg: Handheld with Cloud Gaming capabilities (6G), you don't just copy/paste Netflix, it's not just about distribution

These guys got it:

https://gpd.hk/gpdwin4

https://store.ayaneo.com/store/5

There is also a whole market of android/linux dedicated devices: https://retrododo.com/

> This is not a Playstation Portable, so you refuse to understand.. this is a local Wifi display with a controller, this is akin to the WiiU's gamepad, not a Gameboy, not a 3DS, not a Switch (PS5 is the WiiU, Playstation Q is the WiiU's gamepad, it's called: remote play)

I understand that. But you're describing ways they are different, not how they don't compete. If I can replace my Switch with one of these, they compete. If it's a worse experience, that's just being bad at competing, but they're still competing.

> I'm not idiot, I understand cloud gaming is the natural evolution of gaming,

Exactly. This is still gaming. This competes with other gaming

The big players all seem to be interested in 'portables' that feel very large and cumbersome to carry.

I'd be much more interested in a PSVita or even GBA Micro sized device.

I think portables have settled around the Switch/Deck/Ally form factor because that's about as small as you can make a system while being able to run "full sized" games. You need enough processing power to run the games to a reasonable standard, and the battery/cooling to back that up, and enough physical space for all of the buttons and sticks on a conventional controller, and a big enough screen to see what's going on in games designed for TVs, which means you can't realistically go smaller than the Switch Lite.

Sure you could make "pocket sized" games designed specifically for much more limited hardware like they did during the Gameboy and DS eras, but I'm not sure how much appetite there is for that now that people have had a taste of full fat console games on the go.

The Switch and the Deck are completely different sizes, though. The Deck I would consider at the very upper end of actually portable, while the Switch really does feel like it strikes a magical balance of pocketability, screen size and weight - not to mention battery life.

Give me the Deck any day, though. Nintendo’s game pricing is absurd and the JoyCon controls are absolutely awful for adult hands. Like, “how did this happen”-level bad, imo. Valve has a tie-up with iFixit for the Deck, too, so I expect many happy years of use.

Perhaps we’ll get a PC-based device between the two in a couple of years time. Deck-quality controls. 8” 1080p OLED VRR display. ~500g. 3 hour battery life. 1080p60-capable on more recent titles. That would seem like the golden path.

It's still too early to say what it'll be like but the Asus Rog Ally is interesting and sounds like it checks off some of your requirements:

https://rog.asus.com/gaming-handhelds/rog-ally/rog-ally-2023...

Again, it isn't even out yet and I imagine it'll take a few months to iron out bugs but I'm curious how this will be.

Yes, the Ally brings some nice features to the table - the Z1 APU being the centrepiece (although it didn’t seem to impress Digital Foundry as much as the on-paper specs suggested it might). 120hz VRR display and an excellent and near-silent cooling system are other standouts.

For the cons: very short battery life, poor back paddle placement, some questions around QC on the face buttons. And the big one: as Windows has no gamepad-native interface, you’re stuck with Asus’ Armory Crate front-end which seems to be half-baked at best. I don’t think it’s the work of a moment to fix that kind of thing.

Asus has done a pretty good job of tarnishing its reputation of late. I’d feel like I never knew how long they were going to support it and what would happen if it needed repairs. Subjective, but I reckon it looks terrible, too.

I think my next handheld will again be from Valve.

Also now people get used to average smartphone size. I used PSP as a bigger multimedia device 15 years ago, but now it's small in retrospect.

Check out the Retroid Pocket Flip [1], which is basically a recreation of the DS form factor as a relatively powerful Android device (though, sadly, with only one screen).

[1]: https://www.goretroid.com/collections/frontpage/products/ret...

Sure, I own a not completely dissimilar device to run retroarch on. While the company that makes my device seems to be a profitable business, I specifically was commenting on actions from large players.

I have a GBA micro and I can't imagine something like this ever being released again to a wide market. It's just too dang small! Now a GBA (or SP) sized handheld I'd definitely be down for.

I've always hoped they would release a successor to the Xperia play phone. That looked perfect for on the go. And overall their current phones are not too bad either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play

I know that this is not what the announcement is about, but if they are embracing remote streaming maybe they might make something similar in the future.

I remember when this came out it blew my mind as a kid and I really wanted it. Now we are deep in the era of the resurgence of the handheld and it's everything I ever wanted!

Streaming from your existing console is an interesting choice. No/less server costs, but also a bunch of extra latency if you are away from home. So maybe mostly for in-house streaming? would have to be relatively cheap to justify itself for that IMHO, but that's possible.

It'd be pretty cool if games could use it to argument playing on the TV too, like multi-player gaming on one console with separate displays, for games that don't need all CPU power that is, or extra stats or whatever in some triple A game.

The Wii-U did this and it was a massive flop.

The market failure of the Wii U was in large due to marketing -- many consumers were given the impression that it was an accessory for the Wii, not an entirely new console.

I'm sure this accessory for the PS5 will do much better then!

You can already do that. Just turn on your tv and remote play in, it’ll be seen as another controller.

Supposedly a remote steaming device. I was going to say, good luck competing with Asus Ally & future AMD chips especially!

I mean they would just buy AMD chips and PlayStation certainly has much better chances of making a portable console stick than asus

Asus might not have a better chance but I feel like Steam has the best chance of all. What would Sony'd competitive advantage be, creating their own non-PC system?

They have exclusive games.

All of the major consoles have been using AMD for multiple generations now.

competing with the asus ally is simple. It doesn't have enough battery life to play games at full resolution and high refresh rate without being plugged in, it isn't as efficient at lower power gaming as the existing steam deck, and it costs more than the steam deck. It's PR claims were a lot better than the benchmarks, and I don't really need a portable that requires being plugged in all the time to be effective - thats sort of missing the whole point.

Reminds me of the Wii U gamepad.

That’s exactly what it is.

And you know what? That was the best part of the Wii U! You could play games while watching TV. Or while someone else watched TV. With any luck you can play this in another room!

I’ve wanted this for years.

One wish: OLED. I don’t wan’t to go back to LCD.

I'd be surprised if it wasn't an OLED panel considering Sony's Vita back in 2011 had one.

Unfortunately The Verge says it’s LCD.

Despite all the advantages, LCD is much cheaper.

I wonder if it will have VRR or 120hz though. Can’t wait to see Digital Foundry play with one.

That design looks not portable... cloud only.

Already bought into the PlayStation Portable and the Vita. I think I'll skip this next one.

Imagine applying that logic to the failure of the Wii U and assuming the Switch would also fail.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35748566

Old threads lock! Enduro 2

Anytime now I’ll run my second marathon…

Interesting

Reply on news.ycombinator.com