Sony may be on the verge of making the device not just for remote play (and you’d need a PlayStation 5 for that), but for much more.

November 15th was the first birthday of PlayStation Portal. Sony originally promoted it as a PlayStation 5 accessory that would allow you to stream games from your home console. Only at the end of November this year, Sony introduced cloud gaming on a trial basis, meaning that if you have a PlayStation Plus subscription, you can play games not only with your PlayStation 5 on what is essentially a DualSense controller with a display, but also without it.

But again, it’s not a sudden change, it’s the result of a longer plan. Hiromi Wakai Wakai, vice president of product development at Sony Interactive Entertainment, told Game File. Cloud streaming was in the pipeline from the early stages of PlayStation Portal’s development, but Sony’s decision to add it was partly due to feedback after the product’s launch, as the public wanted cloud streaming to be supported on the device.

According to Wakai, Sony wanted to be very careful to ensure the best experience from day one, which is why cloud gaming was missing at launch (or why they thought the device would be successful without it), and Sony wants to continue with this approach. So more features will be coming to PlayStation Portal. The cloud option is also still limited, as it supports 120 games that are part of the PlayStation Plus premium offering.

Sony has yet to release official sales figures for PlayStation Portal, but according to a September market report from Circana (NPD Group), 3% of PlayStation 5 owners in the US had PlayStation Portal. This suggests that around 650,000 units were sold in the country in the first ten months, and the fact that you can now stream some games from the cloud could push that figure even higher.

The question is what else Sony can innovate with.

Source: GameRant