Demand for the PS5’s handheld gaming accessory, the PlayStation Portal, has continued to “exceed” the expectations of Sony.
Speaking during an interview, PlayStation’s VP of product management Hiromi Wakai stated that the demand for the PlayStation Portal has continued to exceed the company’s expectations. She didn’t have any numbers to share, however.
Wakai pointed out that, from the beginning, PlayStation Portal was intended to be a product best suited for people with specific needs and those who want to play in a specific way, so the reactions after the announcement were very much within Sony’s expectations. As such, it’s likely that the company had modest expectations from the gaming accessory in terms of demand prior to launch.
She acknowledged that early adopters of the device played a crucial role in promoting potential use cases to skeptics. Within Sony, various scenarios for the Portal’s utility were discussed, such as playing PS5 games while conversing with someone using the TV in the same room, or playing PS5 games in one’s bedroom with the console being located elsewhere in the house. Upon its release, Wakai’s team received positive feedback from early Portal users, particularly those with reliable home internet connections. She mentioned that some users experienced lag due to unstable home internet, and some of them ended up upgrading their internet as a result.
According to Wakai, the original idea for the PlayStation Portal came from Sony’s goal to provide high quality console gaming experiences in the players’ hands. It was originally conceived by Hideaki Nishino, the head of Sony’s PlayStation Experience Group. She mentioned that the company presumed it would be able to achieve this goal at an affordable price by utilizing a technical solution often referred to as “Thin Client” i.e. a system that performs a majority of the processes on the servers instead of local hardware. The aim was to accomplish all this while maintaining the full features of a DualSense wireless controller and a screen that is capable of displaying content with crisp image and text.
