PlayStation 5 Handheld in the Works to Rival Nintendo Switch

Sony is reportedly in the initial stages of developing a new PlayStation 5 handheld console that will compete directly with the Nintendo Switch. The surprising news comes from Bloomberg, which cites anonymous sources and also clarifies that the plans have not been finalized. The console may not even ever make it to the market. This puts it roughly on par with what we know about Microsoft’s Xbox handheld. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer recently confirmed it is being made but also added it is years away.

Sony has a long history of making PlayStation handhelds, of course. The first one they produced was the PlayStation Portable, colloquially known as PSP, which launched between late 2004 and early 2005 across the world as a competitor to the Nintendo DS. The PSP was well received and Sony managed to sell a lot of units (76.4 million units as of 2012, the latest public figure), although not nearly as many as the Nintendo DS.

They tried again with the PlayStation Vita, which debuted between late 2011 (Japan) and 2012 (North America and Europe). However, the PS Vita was, by and large, a commercial failure, leading to the decision to abandon first-party game development for the platform in 2015.

Sony kind of revived its handheld tradition with the PlayStation Portal, which launched earlier this year to seemingly solid sales. However, the Portal is only dedicated to streaming games via cloud. Interestingly, the Bloomberg article reports that was not always the case, as Sony had previously considered making it more like Valve’s Steam Deck.

A rumor posted by Moore’s Law Is Dead earlier this year suggests that Sony would once again partner with AMD on this new hardware. That report mentioned compatibility with both PS4 and PS5 games, although Bloomberg only mentions that it will be a PlayStation 5 handheld. The latter option seems more likely: considering that the hardware is still a few years away, supporting PlayStation 4 games wouldn’t really make sense at that point.