The handheld, codenamed Q-Lite, is no coincidence, but a State of Play will precede its release.

Sony has announced on Twitter that a new State of Play will arrive on April 13 at 2 PM Pacific/5 PM Eastern, with over 20 minutes of Final Fantasy XVI gameplay. You can watch it on Twitch and YouTube. “From the moment Final Fantasy XVI debuted in our 2020 PlayStation 5 Showcase, fans worldwide have eagerly awaited details on the game’s dark fantasy setting, the powerful Eikons and the Dominants who house them, and the flashy battle system teased in those early trailers. We’re happy to announce this week’s State of Play will dive into all this and more,” Square Enix wrote on the PlayStation Blog. Final Fantasy XVI will be released on PlayStation 5 on June 22, and the Japanese title has been developed with help from Sony.

Meanwhile, Sony is also looking to gain a foothold in the cloud market, as The Verge has found twenty-two job offers from Sony looking for people to join the company’s Future Technology Group (FTG) to “develop and deliver the strategic vision for cloud game streaming at PlayStation.” FTG aims to “put console-quality video games on any device and lead the charge in the cloud gaming revolution.” That sounds a bit Microsoft-y… but what about the agreement between the two companies to work together on this same technology?

The job offers suggest Sony is going alone and wants to build a new hybrid cloud infrastructure using AWS (Amazon Web Services). Sony has been involved in the cloud for some time. Earlier this year, a patent from the company (in which Sony tends to call its competition inferior, as mentioned the other day) surfaced talking about it, and Jade Raymond (Ubisoft: Assassin’s Creed; Electronic Arts Motive: Star Wars Battlefront II; Stadia Games & Entertainment, now Haven Studios) is working on a cloud-based game development system.

So things are looking up around Sony.

Source: Gematsu, PSL