The evolution of the PlayStation Portal has been interesting to watch, mainly seeing Sony practically struggling to keep up with the gadget’s unexpected popularity. Launched in November 2023, Portal was intended to be a standalone accessory for the PlayStation 5. It had no native processing capabilities, simply using Sony’s Remote Play technology to stream whatever was happening on players’ personal PS5 to the portable’s screen.
Although it could technically be used anywhere with a strong Wi-Fi signal, the difficulty of connecting to a public network and the high speed requirements for launching a stream meant that Portal was effectively only suitable for home use, to free up the main TV or run in another room.
Somehow, it still went ahead, with Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hideki Nishino saying in 2024 that Portal had been a “huge success”. That same year, Sony made it easier to connect to public Wi-Fi and added true cloud gaming support to the portal, along with a selection of games for players who subscribe to PlayStation Plus Premium. The initial offering included “over 120 PS5 games from the PS Plus game catalogue”, although the curated library was subject to change. This could have been a huge change in the way players adopted hardware and software alike, but in practice, it didn’t really pay off.
Yet, another year passes and the portal’s success seems unstoppable. Sony’s Takuro Fushimi recently told TechRadar that “the community response has been tremendous” and that Portal is now “the most widely used tool for PS5 Remote Play.” It’s a bit surprising, then, that Sony keeps trying to mold it into something that, if you squint, looks like the standalone gaming handheld it was never intended to be, but that players desperately want.
Clear sky?
Enter the latest update on the PlayStation Portal. This takes cloud streaming out of its beta phase, expanding the streamable library from only those titles included in the PS Plus selection to many of the games players own digitally. As of now, if you didn’t have a game installed locally on your PS5 or it wasn’t included in that cloud catalog, too bad, no Portal plays for you. Moving forward, you’ll be able to cloud stream many titles if they’re linked to your PlayStation account through a purchase on the PlayStation Store – though you’ll still need to subscribe to the PS Plus premium tier to use this feature, which will cost you $160 for the entire year.
The available assortment is already huge – over 3,000 games at the time of writing. At first glance, this should be a transformative development not only for Portal, but for PlayStation as a gaming ecosystem. This potentially increases the availability of your owned titles to where you want to play them, and may even help alleviate data storage issues. Although the PS5’s internal drive can be expanded, SSDs can be expensive at higher capacities, and players with large digital collections often can’t install everything they have. Being able to stream games associated with your account without wasting drive space can be a great solution.
The update also aims to improve the overall player experience on the portal. It finally adds the ability to make in-game purchases during cloud streaming (potentially useful if you want to purchase some DLC or virtual currency), and allows players to receive game invites to multiplayer sessions while playing games via the cloud. Previously, these features were only enabled for Remote Play gaming on Portal, as they were effectively being done through the PS5 and visible on Portal’s screen. Accessibility features have also been improved by adding screen reader tools and adjustable text size.
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