If Sony makes a "Playstation Switch" could it succeed?

[EricHiggin]

KBG29 said:

EricHiggin said: 

I think both a portable/hybrid and phone could do well enough to make it worth supporting, but I don't see either product coming anywhere close to PS4 territory. Even PS3 numbers would surprise me. Maybe sales of both added together. PS would also have to focus more on free to play games, first and third party. I would have to assume if they were going to attempt this, they would try a Switch like model first, and if that sold well enough, then the phone possibly. They would have the gaming aspect covered well, but as for the rest of the phone itself, trying to take a larger portion of Apple and Samsung's pie isn't going to be easy. A small handheld with the flip screen portion being removable as a phone would be their best bet I think. Small enough to be a phone, large enough together to be a handheld with decent controls. I think PS needs a strong enough and stable enough handheld/hybrid before they even attempt an all in one phone with a strong gaming focus.

I think they have to have the Phone and Hybrid/Portable option available from day one. The biggest complaint I heard about Vita from non gaming forum types, was the lack of a system level phone/text support. People love the idea of the Vita, having better inputs than just touch, and higher quality games, but without it being a phone people lost interest. Most people don't  want to carry around a seperate phone and a handheld.

Basically if they make any handheld, it should have have a Wifi only model, and a 4G/5G Phone model. Once they have the ground work for this type of product layed, offering a version with mobile support is a very high potential, and very low cost option. If they could work out deals with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon in the US, they could easily move more units of a PlayStation Phone than they currently are with the whole range of Xperia devices.

I have a really hard time seeing x86 in a phone. To go to the trouble of creating a system like Nin and Nvidia did for the Switch, to port to ARM more easily, really seems like a massive leap if it were going to happen. If they were going to do that, then they might as well make the handheld ARM and port the x86 console games to the ARM mobile devices. How much that would effect the mobile version of games vs the console games in terms of quality I don't know, but I would have to assume it would either mean one or the other would suffer considerably, which defeats the purpose. In terms of Ryzen, a handheld to me, seems to be the limit in terms of strong enough performance with worthwhile portability. I know AMD is dabbling in ARM here and there, so PS could get them to help design the future hardware ecosystem that requires both for this vision. With AMD and Intel working together to put Vega and HBM on the EMIB, PS could try to convince AMD to collaborate with someone else ARM related and do something similar with Navi/next gen.

A handheld/hybrid, which has proven to be a huge hit so far, just seems like a much more logical and safe path overall. They probably could do the phone, but I just see it being way to big of a step outside the box and too much risk. To me, using the handheld/hybrid to start the push into the mobile gaming market would be the way to go, then solidify it with the phone hardware. If they tried handheld and phone at once, and it fails, that's a much bigger hit to take. The way I would see it working if PS really wanted both and fairly soon, would be to completely separate the consoles and the mobiles. Different hardware designs and different games for both. They could all be PS branded, but no crossover, and must be well supported, first and third party.

Last edited by EricHiggin - on 17 January 2018