As I’m sure you’re aware, Sony is teaming up with the Federal Trade Commission to try and stop Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard. The hearing, which just concluded its fifth and final day today, has been surprisingly illuminating with regards to both Microsoft and Sony’s internal communications, and bits of informat🍰ion about both companies’ business plans have been revealed through various evidentiary statements and documents. One particular filing from Microsoft mentions Project Q, the handheld companion device to the PS5 announced during the PlayStation showcase earlier this year. According to Microsoft’s lawyers, Project Q is expected to launch this year at a price point “under $300”.
While this doesn’t tell us exactly how much Project Q will cost, using $300 as a reference point leads me to believe that it is going to be somewhere between $200-$300. $300 is possible, $250 seems the most likely, and if it's $200, that will shock some people. Sony probably can’t afford to go much lower than that on hardware like this. A DualSense by itself is $70, how little can we expect to pay for one that’s been chopped in half with an eight-inch tablet shoved in the middle?
That’s essentially all Project Q is, which is the device’s fundamental problem. In fact, an Android tablet with half a DualSense stuck to either side would actually be more us💛eful, since it would still function as a tablet. The only thing Project Q can do, as far as we know, is stream PS5 games across your home network. I’d be willing to pay for a dedicated PS5 streaming device, but there’s no way I’m going to pay w𒈔hatever Sony is asking for it.
The value proposition for Proj🅺ect Q is incredibly low. Once we start thinking of it as an “under $300” console, we have to compare it to other, similar consoles. $300 is the price of a new Nintendo Switch, a console that doesn’t require you to stream games from another console over the same network. The same was true of the PSP and the Vita, which both launched at $250.
You almost certainly already have devices that do exactly what Project Q will do. If you have a DualSense controller - which you’d need anyway, since Project Q is onl🦄y for PS5 owners - and a smartphone, you can use the ౠPlayStation app to stream games. Any tablet can do this, including ones with much bigger and nicer displays than Project Q (Jim Ryan said “HD display”, which I took to mean not OLED) and, again, also do all the things a tablet does.
I’ve gotten pretty into handheld streaming devices, and a few have impressed me. The 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Razer Edge is a $400 mobile gaming handheld that justifies its price with sophisticated hardware and incredible versatility. It does Android games better than any other handhel💙d, and it’s also great for streaming Game Pass, Geforce Now, and PlayStation Remote Play. Why would you buy Project Q when you can spend a little more and get so many other ways to play games?
Anything over $200 will be death for Project Q, but personally, I wouldn’t go above $150, and I 𒁏consider myself an enthusiast for this kind of hardware. It just doesn’t make sense to invest in this kind of device when there are so many other options for streaming PS5 games, and so many more-equipped handhelds out there. This should be positioned as a last-minute, at the register add-on for the PS5, but I don’t think Sony can possibly get the price low enough to ju🌜stify it.