Does Cloud Gaming on PlayStation Portal Mark the End for Consoles?

As cloud streaming for Portal is in beta, there are a lot of missing features, though. Users won’t be able to play “streaming games purchased on PS Store,”—only those included in the subscription-dependent Premium catalog—and it’s restricted to PS5 titles. PS3 and PS4 games are explicitly excluded, which seems slightly odd.

Game trials are also locked out, as are some system features, such as party voice chat, 3D audio support, or “in-game commerce.” That last one’s probably a good thing to leave out for now—the last thing anyone wants is a dropped connection potentially messing up a DLC transaction involving real money.

Sony says games can be streamed at up to 1080p full HD quality at 60 fps, with save data able to be transferred over the cloud, too. “Up to” is key though—you’ll need a minimum 5 Mbps of up/download speeds to even establish a cloud gaming session, with 720p quality requiring a minimum 7 Mbps, and 1080p needing 13 Mbps. Realistically, based on similar game streaming services and the Portal’s own performance even on an in-home network, expect to need even higher speeds for a viable experience.

End of the Console Era?

What’s particularly interesting here is timing. Portal as it launched was essentially an evolution of the same Remote Play feature that Sony has been offering in various incarnations for decades—PSP used the earliest version of the tech to connect to PS3 back in 2006, followed by PS Vita pairing with PS3 and PS4.

Nowadays, almost any device with a screen, an internet connection, and a paired controller can use Remote Play to stream a mirror of your PS5—Portal was just a dedicated bit of kit to do that on. The introduction of cloud gaming may make Portal that bit more feature-rich, but it may also point to a growing trend among console manufacturers to leave the console behind entirely.

Take Sony’s arch gaming rival Microsoft—its current marketing push is that almost anything “is an Xbox.” A large part of that hinges on accessing Xbox services “with the help of Cloud Gaming,” turning any device with a screen, an internet connection, and a paired controller (sound familiar?) into an Xbox.

Nintendo, meanwhile, has allowed certain games to launch on the Switch as cloud-only titles, and although this is usually restricted to titles that are typically too demanding or too large for the Switch to run natively (such as Resident Evil Village or Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy), it shows even the notoriously conservative Japanese company isn’t averse to at least experimenting with games that only exist in the ether.