PlayStation Portal is the ideal device for gamers in households where they may need to share their living room TV or simply want to play PS5 games in another room of the house.
Okay I can see there being a niche there, mom and dad want to watch a movie but Jr wants to play games. I don't know if that's a huge market, but okay
According to the description, PlayStation Portal is only a Remote Play device and will not allow access to cloud streaming of games on PlayStation Plus Premium. As a result, in order for the PlayStation Portal to function properly, players must own PS5 hardware.
This however seems like a massive lost opportunity. Like Steam Link I assume you could choose which device to stream from, and with companies being huge on the "reoccurring revenue" train this seems like it could have added a ton of value to the device and at the same time increased their subscriptions. It would have gone from a "at home only toy for a niche market" to "pretty much anyone who has a PS5 at home and/or travels"
There are definitely times when either my kids or my wife is watching something and I'd rather be gaming so I think I'd probably use something like this. However, last time I tried a remote play solution from Sony the lag was brutal, so I'm a bit skeptical.
My experience with steam link was.... Really bad. I also tried the stadia, terrible. Unless things have changed very recently streaming game tech just isn't there yet.
Streaming steam has gotten better, but it really depends on the game. I'd never play a twitch shooter like counter strike on it, but before the Deck I'd stream the Witcher from my home PC to my tiny travel laptop and it was playable. Never as a primary driver though
It certainly is a common occurrence, but I don't see many households dropping another $200 on top of the cost of the PS5. If this existed back in the days, my parents would have told me to either play something else/go outside, or move the console to my room.
I've used remote play to play a casual / non-story game while watching Sports or some other background noise show on my TV more times than I can count. This is perfect for me.