PlayStation 5 still dominates the current generation of consoles, but the PS6 isn’t as far away as you might think.
Sony’s next console is expected to enter production in 2027 and launch at the end of the year, but could break out of the norm a bit with a handheld component.
After the success of the Switch (and its successor) and handheld PCs like the Steam Deck, there are rumors that Sony is moving into the handheld space for the first time in over a decade, and while we wouldn’t expect the PS6 to be a hybrid system, we can imagine Sony pushing something portable.
However, it’s a very different world to 2011 when Sony launched the PlayStation Vita – so what can it do differently this time?
Days passed
To understand Sony’s potential role here, we need to go back a bit. The PlayStation Portable (or PSP) was an absolute delight and could have been a real home console competitor with the addition of an analog stick.
It came out in 2004 (at least in Japan) and I can’t tell you how many hours I put into Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 Remix and Def Jam: Fight for NY. When the Vita launched in 2011 (again in Japan) and 2012 in the rest of the world, the world was a different place.
The iPhone had put a web browser, an app store, and more in our hands, sparking a smartphone arms race that continues to this day. Android was also starting to take off, and while commuters enjoyed playing the great games on their phones, they weren’t necessarily looking to play a full Uncharted adventure on the train.
The Vita could have been an incredible PSP successor if there wasn’t such a gap between the two. Sony essentially ran the same playbook more than half a decade apart and simply couldn’t find an answer to the smartphone market.
It can be argued that it was Nintendo that found this balance with the first Switch. While the console wasn’t cheap, it was cheaper than buying a home console and a dedicated handheld, and you didn’t have to change games when you left the house. In many ways it felt like Sony was making certain moves to allow Nintendo to compete, and while that may be an exaggeration, Nintendo is certainly in a race now.
The company’s latest console, the 2025 Nintendo Switch 2, is essentially a more powerful Switch and will have to accommodate the rise of handheld PC alternatives to consoles.
The new state of things
With this (very abbreviated) history lesson behind us, the landscape now looks completely different. And given the cyclical nature of things, it might not be the worst idea for Sony to run the same old PSP playbook: give us a console that can play console-quality games, and give us the games we can play on it.
Of course, that’s largely what Nintendo does. Nintendo knows that its “secret sauce” lies in exclusives, so it knows that you’re buying a Switch 2 for Pokémon, Mario, Zelda, or anything else you can possibly get.
Unlike Microsoft, a company that wants to release its games almost everywhere, Sony has its own intellectual property, but if you start making the next God of War title exclusive to handhelds, people will lose their minds – unless It’s the same PlayStation 6 game that you can take anywhere else.
Because of this, it feels like everything the PS6 does as a handheld is tied to a larger system so you can continue playing at home. Longtime leaker Moore’s Law is Dead has suggested that PlayStation’s recent push for power saving mode will likely help games run on some sort of PS6 handheld.
“It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Low Power Mode is a Trojan horse to prepare PS6 handheld support ahead of release, and they honestly seemed a little annoyed at how few developers are directly supporting it so far,” a source told him.
While one could argue that the Steam Deck and other handheld PCs like the Asus ROG Xbox Ally buck this trend by not being hybrid in nature, there is an argument for it: you can play a “good enough” version of your favorite game knowing that you can log in to your PC or Xbox at home to pick it up via cloud storage.
To paraphrase the Joker in The Dark Knight: “There’s no going back, you’ve changed things.” The Switch launched an arms race to combine portability and power efficiency in a way we haven’t seen in gaming for some time. Manufacturers like Lenovo, Asus, MSI and many others are racing head-to-head to squeeze a drop of extra performance out of their hardware without compromising battery life.
Is Sony ready for such competition this time? I would argue that they have a better chance than most. I think we were all surprised when Switch 2 was confirmed to use some resemblance to DLSS 4.0, as Nintendo has never been on the cutting edge of hardware development, but this is Sony we’re talking about.
While the Vita had many flaws, in 2011 it also had a great OLED display. This is the company behind Blu-Ray, which put a DVD player in the PS2, and was the only manufacturer to introduce a mid-gen refresh this time around with the PS5 Pro.
Then there’s an ongoing partnership with AMD that’s helping to improve upscaling on the PS5 Pro and will likely only help deliver further efficiencies on the back of the proverbial sofa.
There’s also the argument that Sony already has something of an ecosystem in place. While the PlayStation Portal isn’t capable of playing PS5 games natively, it has a sleek interface and is a perfect match for the new console, offering a comfortable form factor and a large display. Is it really as simple as taking what’s already there and sticking the core of a console into it?
It’s hard to say, but Sony recently introduced the option to stream games directly to it without a console, showing that they certainly haven’t forgotten about the 2023 device.
More storage space, more problems?
In many ways, Sony’s biggest opponent here is Sony itself. The company has released two handheld consoles with proprietary memory cards that cost a fortune for small profits, but such a trick doesn’t work these days.
microSD cards can be plugged into your handheld PC, and while Nintendo has taken a bit of flak for its insistence on microSD Express cards, it’s still probably easier to get hold of than the Sony Memory Stick Duos of yesteryear (ask your parents, kids).
But maybe Sony will come up with the idea of letting users choose their own solutions. The PS5 foregoes the expensive memory card format of the Xbox Series S and X and allows users to install their own drives under the hood, while the PS4 supports USB hard drives.
If Sony can allow microSD card functionality from the start on a potential PS6 handheld, we may see it create the kind of buzz the Vita could only dream of.
