If you’ve been waiting to grab a PlayStation 5, this Black Friday gaming deal is worth noting.
The PlayStation Portal is the rare product that launched as a truly baffling device, but has evolved into something genuinely useful. At first, it could only stream games from your PlayStation 5, it lacked core features for a handheld like Bluetooth audio and it felt a bit overpriced at $200 for such a limited product. Add on the fact that home streaming can be notoriously unreliable, since it depends entirely on your ISP and home networking setup, and the Portal simply didn't make much sense.
Sony had some new hardware to reveal during its State of Play Japan showcase on Tuesday. Along with a refreshed Japanese-only PS5 Digital Edition, the company unveiled an official PlayStation monitor that you can also hook your PC up to.
It's been just over a year since Sony launched the updated PS5 Slim and PS5 Pro consoles, so how's that going given Sony's pessimistic
Sony is bringing things home with State of Play Japan. The "special episode" will feature the same type of PlayStation gaming announcements as a typical State of Play broadcast, but with a focus solely on Japan and Asia.
When it was first announced, the PlayStation Portal was sort of a joke. The Nintendo Switch was a megahit, and many PlayStation fans had long hoped Sony would respond with a new handheld of its own. It did… in the form of a $200 peripheral that can only stream games over the internet and required you to already own a PlayStation 5.
Nintendo has been a bit more focused on mobile apps in recent years, having released the likes of Nintendo Today! and Nintendo Music (not to mention games like
Slowly but surely, Sony has been transforming the initially limited PlayStation Portal into a viable handheld for PS5 gamers, albeit only those with a solid internet connection.
The last 12 months have been pretty depressing for anyone invested in the long-term future of Xbox and the general health of the games industry.
Players aren't the only ones facing higher price tags from Xbox. According to a report by The Verge, Microsoft has upped the cost of the Xbox Development Kit from $1,500 to $2,000. That's a 33 percent jump in cost for these custom hardware kits, which are essential for devs to make and test games for release on the console.