What is Sony’s Project Q actually for?

It’s always fun to spice up a summer console showcase with a little hardware reveal, but Sony’s reveal of its Project Q handheld at the PlayStation Showcase on Wednesday was one of the more dizzying.

Project Q is an 8-inch screen device that lets you play PlayStation 5 games using Sony’s Remote Play system and stream them from your PS5 over Wi-Fi “when you’re away from your TV,” according to the press. Edition. It looks like a DualSense controller chopped in half and attached to either end of a switch’s center section.

Here’s what it isn’t: a true handheld console or a cloud gaming device. The games run locally on your PS5 and without a cellular connection, Project Q won’t work on the move unless the plane or train you’re on happens to have an extremely robust WiFi connection or you invest in a 5G hub on a good network. (Sony says Project Q needs “at least 5 Mbps” to run, with “a better gaming experience” needing at least 15 Mbps.) The games also need to be installed on the PS5, which limits using Project Q with the cloud. gaming excludes service that is part of Sony’s PlayStation Plus subscription offering.

Really, Project Q is about giving you access to your PS5 games from anywhere in the house – when the TV is in use or when you’re in bed. Or it could work well if you’re staying with family or vacationing in an Airbnb.

This is what remote play does – and has actually done for a long time. The feature was launched way back in 2006 with PlayStation 3 and initially only worked with the PlayStation Portable and later with the Vita handheld. Over time, support expanded to other Sony devices, then to Windows and Mac PCs, and finally, in 2019, to Android and iOS mobile devices. It’s not too difficult to set up on a laptop, phone or iPad in combination with a PlayStation controller, and it can be very useful. But it’s never been used that much.

So the questions are: what does Project Q bring to the table? And why is Sony now, after 17 years, investing in Remote Play with a dedicated device?

The appeal of a dedicated device is easy enough to understand: the form factor of a portable console is more comfortable than a separate controller and small screen in most situations. Project Q offers this comfort, and as an official single-use PlayStation device, it should work more seamlessly than any other Remote Play solution. (You can get Remote Play to work on a Steam Deck, but it’s quite a hassle.) Unlike third-party devices or controllers, it offers all the features of the DualSense, including the adaptive triggers and fine haptic feedback. The screen’s 1080p resolution will certainly be good enough for its size, although an OLED panel like the top-of-the-line Switch would have been nice, rather than the LCD panel that Sony offers.

The point of Project Q is presumably that it will provide the ideal no-compromise Remote Play solution in the home, with the utmost ease of use. But what it won’t do is offer more than that, and it’s duplicating work that other devices you already own can do. There’s even an officially licensed PlayStation version of the Backbone game controller for mobile and an Android version of it was announced the day before Project Q was. It may not have the DualSense features, but it has the advantage of potentially making Remote Play truly portable, if your mobile data plan and service can meet the data demands.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Project Q is that Sony isn’t extending its capabilities to streaming games from the cloud so it could run independently of a PS5. Cloud streaming doesn’t require a huge amount of processing power – just connectivity and a video decoder that Project Q should theoretically already have. Maybe Sony couldn’t make it work well enough at cost, but then again, maybe investing a little extra and risking a higher price would have been worth it to increase the usefulness of the device and future-proof it.

The existence of Project Q suggests that Sony is aware of the demand for gaming to better fit into people’s lives; to be more flexible and less tied to a large electronic brick under the desk or TV. The massive success of Nintendo’s Switch is proof of that, and Microsoft and others are betting that this desire means gaming will eventually follow other entertainment media into the realm of cloud streaming.

In fact, Sony was an early investor in cloud gaming technology. It bought the Gaikai platform for $380 million in 2012 to build the PlayStation Now service, but never seemed to know what to do with it. The fact is, the cloud doesn’t fit comfortably with Sony’s business model, culture or values. Sony is an entertainment industry giant built on the back of an old-school consumer electronics maker, and many of the people in power are engineers who excel at building gadgets or marketers (like PlayStation boss Jim Ryan) who excel in its insertion. boxes and sell them.

Well, now the engineers have another gadget to make and the marketers have another box to sell. But there’s not much in the box. As a way to make the benefits of Remote Play more accessible and marketable, Project Q makes sense, in a niche way. But in response to gaming’s fast-changing future, it’s more than a little retarded.