I hear the war horns already.
Just the other day my brother randomly asks me if I think Sony will ever get back into the handheld's game, whilst I was remarking on the fruitful life of the Playstation Portable. I had one of those back in the day, and in the absence of any other console that little piece of plastic was the absolute light of my life- the cornerstone of my busy little day. I couldn't imagine any extended break away from schoolwork without whipping out that badboy and getting lost in a compressed adventure and hardware so stressed I could hear the machine frantically whirling to keep up with me in the back of the little buddy. But in my hubris, I thought on those as days of the past and handwaved away the possibilities. "No" I said, literally 10 minutes before the next Playstation handheld was revealed on my feed apparently due to hit later this year. So much for all this 'industry watching' that I do...
Now we have the pearl white visage of the 'Q Lite' looming on the horizon, a codenamed, highly secretive, model for Sony's aspiring handheld efforts they've written up to jab back at the overbearing dominance of the Nintendo Switch for that market. The unfettered dominance that the Switch has enjoyed, hardly marred at all by the decidedly more niche Steam Deck, (thanks to the wildly different audience) seems all but geared for a competitor to light things on fire. For a time it felt as if the Handheld world was being slowly wrung dry with DS after 3DS after WII U- (Even though that last one wasn't technically a handheld... I think) but the Switch reminded everyone how useful it can be to have quality games in the palm of your hand, as long as the console can run them.
Coincidentally enough I was brought back to the first PlayStation handheld which found any mainstream success, the PSP, by a totally unrelated incident. I just finished Persona 4 Golden and though I had previously vowed to move onto Persona 5 after my over half a decade wait- I wanted that shining beacon on my horizon for a little while longer, so I impulsively brought Persona 3's Steam port instead. And what has been my reward thus far? A port of a PSP port that was once gutted down thanks to the limitations of the PSP hardware- jettisoning me back to the age when I was an avid PSP player who regularly endured lower-rent versions of popular games thanks to the weakness of the overheating piece of plastic in my lap. Which is to say, I'm a little miffed.
PSP has a lot of quality of life features to turn the actual gameplay into something resembling a modern day RPG, but it sacrifices a heck of a lot to do so. All the animated 2D Cutscenes are gone, and all open world navigation is reduced to static screenshots and menus; it's all rather depressing. And it reminds me of the hilariously scaled back version of the Transformers console game we had, which felt like a budget mobile title instead of a licenced product. That, I think, was the PSPs rope around it's neck, which only grew tighter as the company fattened up on profits. The console sold like wildfire, but the ever improving standard of the industry made the PSP platform impossible to develop for before too long- cutting off the lifespan of the console before it could bloat to DS lengths.
Of course Sony had it's sequel ready to pick up, the surprisingly powerful PSVita which would have absolutely revived the handheld scene had it managed to see the same success as it's younger brother. Unfortunately, the higher specs ended up being a problem for development just as much as the restrictive specs were for the old console; which meant fewer games could be developed to support the Vita. Additionally, marketing dropped the ball resulting in a lower adoption rate than Sony had hoped for and paving the way for the console to go forgotten about by all but the most niche developers until support was killed for good once Sony did an inventory and remembered they were still paying for server support. (I'm sure they saved a whole 20 dollars a month by cutting that off- what big spenders they are!)
As you can imagine, that whole debacle left something of a bad taste in the mouths of handheld fans, and for pretty good reason. Those who bought the bullet with the Vita found themselves happy with a genuinely powerful console that was treated to high quality first party exclusives when it first dropped and was fresh. It also got Assassin's Creed Liberation, but we don't need to talk about that. These people were believers and zealots in the Vita project, and maintain to this day that Sony were never invested enough in the platform to guarantee it's success; so why would that same crop of people be suddenly won over by this new handheld prospect all of these long years later? Well, seeing the already lukewarm reaction to it- I'm guessing there is no reason and the gloves are off with a mistrustful public against an optimistic corp that promises 'this time will be the time'!
But let us not forget the fact that Sony already launched a new console- kind of- this year. The PSVR 2 headset launched almost entirely devoid of any sort of killer app to sell the thing, demanding a heavy price tag for an unnecessary piece of tag-on hardware. Of course, now the platform is out there, so to speak, and so now we just need to wait for an aspiring world changer to take advantage of that opportunity, but on the books the lower sales of the VR2 just doesn't look very good. Remember, corporate offices, and headline browsers for that matter, don't care about the quality of the figures, only the quantity. This crop of VR users have themselves something of a closed and relatively small community until the hype picks up (and the prices drop a little) so hopefully they can remain committed to the device long enough to see that dawn.
Sometime, and the time may be fast approaching, Sony and Nintendo will meet on the battlefield of destiny, on the cusp of the darkest hour betwixt dusk and dawn, to wrestle once more for supremacy. Nintendo has the tenure, and the headstart in establishment- but already the Switch is threatening to become long-toothed and Nintendo are too scared to replace it for fear of shattering their good thing like they did with the Wii U. Sony, on the otherhand, will carry the best of the best in minature hardware, and I have a feeling they're going to want to hit the ground running with launch title blockbusters. So who will win; the staple or the upstart? Find out on the next episode of- Handheld Ball Budokai Z Remix Master-class Recooked-and-repasted Ultimate Edition 365 and a half Days!
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