It’s not often that something you own is completely transformed overnight without you really even knowing about it, but that’s exactly what’s happened to me. Up until now, I’ve been pretty disappointed with the PlayStation Portal. There are things I love about it, such as the build quality – the screen is big and vibrant, and punches well above its weight considering it’s an LCD rather than an OLED. The DualSense’s haptics are fantastic too, and it’s the closest we’ve ever gotten to a ‘proper’ controller on a portable device. But it’s expensive and, because it has no onboard storage, you cannot download games. It couldn’t play games without being connected to a PS5 either – until this week.
Now, rather than being limited to simply streaming games from a $500 console to a $200 handheld, Sony has introduced a feature that lets owners stream games directly from its PlayStation Now cloud streaming service. No PS5 required.
What’s more, the whole process is fairly straightforward and, more importantly, works great. Once you’ve opted into the beta (which is open to anyone who downloads the firmware update), Portal owners now have the option to either connect the Portal to their PS5 as before, or directly to Sony’s cloud servers. Choose the latter and suddenly you have access to a library of more than 120 games, including Ghost of Tsushima, Resident Evil 3 Remake, The Last of Us Part 1 Remastered, and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales. It’s worth noting you must be a subscriber to the highest tier of PlayStation Plus, but $18 a month is much more attractive that splashing out $500 upfront plus an extra $70 a game.
Honestly, I can’t stress how impressed I am that Sony has given new life to a device I haven’t had the best experience with until this point. It’s a common complaint that the Portal works best when your PS5 is hardwired to the internet, but for me – and probably many others, whose routers are too far away – that simply isn’t an option. As such, the PS Portal was never a compelling way to play games, unless I could deal with the skipped frames and noticeable lag (I couldn’t). But as I write this I’m testing out Death Stranding, Miles Morales, and Demon’s Souls and I’m getting nothing but a silky smooth framerate and connection strength far better than when I was streaming from my PS5, which is ironic considering it’s sitting less than 6 feet away from me.
Of course, cloud gaming is not novel by any means. The ghost of Google Stadia is looking at me angrily through my office window as I type this, and Xbox has its own xCloud gaming service bundled with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. In my limited testing the PS Portal cloud beta works about as well as either of those services.
This doesn’t mean the Portal is suddenly a true successor to the PSP or Vita and there are a few things to consider. Firstly, there’s that PlayStation Plus subscription, which in the United States costs about $18 a month or $160 a year. You’re also limited to PlayStation’s library of streamable games, which includes some heavy hitters like the aforementioned Ghost of Tsushima and Demon’s Souls, but also forgettable filler like Disney Pixar’s Toy Story 3 and My Friend Peppa Pig. Right now, PlayStation Plus’ streaming offering is nowhere near as attractive as Xbox Game Pass and unless Sony makes some big moves in the coming months, don’t expect to play first-party games at launch via PlayStation Plus.
But despite PlayStation Plus’ limited catalog of games, I love the kind of bold experimentation with technology that this update brings. Nowadays, you always know what you’re getting when you buy a new piece of hardware, whether it’s a game console, smartphone, or laptop. Detailed specs are carefully listed and whatever feature isn’t included now is usually reserved for the upgraded version released in a year or two. Instead, Sony turned an existing piece of hardware into something infinitely more exciting without so much as a whisper of the words ‘ Portal 2’.
The fact Portal now does cloud streaming almost perfectly is kinda besides the point because the real game changer here is that this update literally turned PlayStation Portal from one thing into another. It’s a little bit of technological alchemy that’s all too rare in a time of endless hardware sequels, mid-cycle refreshes, pros, slims, and so on. While I rarely use the phrase ‘consumer friendly’, I have to give props to Sony for identifying that it was trying to sell a less-than-compelling $200 accessory to fans and decided to proactively inject it with some added value, and possibly opening up the PlayStation ecosystem to an entirely new group of fans in the process.
Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.