The PlayStation vision for 2026 and beyond is becoming more and more clear.
Sony announced that the PS Portal — a £200 device traditionally sold as ‘a PS5 peripheral’ rather than a standalone, game-ready device — would be getting its biggest update since its 2023 launch. After being in beta for a year, the PS Portal can now stream games directly from PlayStation servers, meaning you can play PlayStation 5 games (or any viable game from your library or the PS Plus Premium collection) directly to the Portal. Suddenly, the machine isn’t just a PS5 peripheral, it’s a little juggernaut in and of itself.
Even before the update, Sony bigwigs were on a victory tour. In an interview with TechRadar Gaming, Takuro Fushimi (senior manager of product management at Sony) revealed that the PS Portal had met and exceeded Sony’s expectations for engagement, and is now the premier place people go to use Remote Play within the PlayStation ecosystem, surpassing mobile PC, PS5, and PS4.
«Before we launched the Portal, some questioned whether there would be demand for it, as it is such a unique product being a dedicated Remote Play device to start off with», Fushimi told the site. «However, we’ve seen the community’s response has been overwhelming.
«Our data shows that PlayStation portal users are more engaged than non-users. [The] PlayStation portal has now become the most widely used device for PlayStation 5 Remote Play, surpassing mobile PC, PS5, and PS4.»
In the same interview, Fushimi noted that the average usage time of the device was «around two hours», and that it is not a standalone console «yet». Now, that last word is very important, because as of this most recent update, the Portal is effectively as useful as a PS5 — if you only want to play certain titles.
