We’ve been hearing from more and more places that Sony is making a new handheld for the PlayStation Vita (or more recently, the PlayStation Portal).

It was first reported in October, courtesy of Bloomberg, that not only was Microsoft working on a handheld (the success of the Nintendo Switch and then handheld PCs played a big part in this), but that Sony was also trying to make a similar product. At the time, it was rumored that the company was still in the early stages of development and that the “portable PlayStation 5” could be years away from release.

On Digital Foundry’s weekly podcast, one of its editors, John Linneman, essentially confirmed Bloomberg’s earlier rumor: “What’s interesting about this is that we actually heard about this handheld a couple of months ago, specifically from a couple of sources. So, we’re not in the business of leaking things, but, interestingly, this is finally kind of making the rounds because it just kind of confirms what we’ve seen and heard off the record that this exists, which is cool.

So, to me, it just kind of reinforces the idea that, yeah, they’re very much working on something. And this article makes it seem like it’s even further out than I actually thought based on that, so I’m not sure where it’s going, I think there’s maybe some prototype stuff out there. There’s still a lot of questions about it, but it feels like this future of offering a handheld and a home console option is very likely at this point,” Linneman said.

Back in October, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that Microsoft was already working on handheld prototypes, so a portable Xbox could be coming. Of course, neither she nor Microsoft know if it will be able to run games locally or if it will only be possible to play games from the cloud (the latter is already implemented by PlayStation Portal).

That Sony is working on a PlayStation handheld is not official yet! But seeing who’s talking about it, you could call it half-official…

Source: VGC