Honestly, dumb as this sounds, they can’t lose. It’s not a platform. There’s no infrastructure. It doesn’t even do cloud streaming, for some reason; it is 100.0% dependent on your hardware and your network. If Sony went bankrupt tomorrow, this gizmo would still work. If the hardware’s sold at a comfortable profit and they’re not gambling anything on its success, why wouldn’t they launch this ridiculous object? They don’t care if you don’t buy it.
Genuinely as hard as “bring back the NGage.” Nobody wants to buy a smartphone that’s also a console platform. There’s no three-year contract required, and AT&T doesn’t get to micromanage the dashboard, but it’s still two wildly different commitments for no sufficient benefit. It means being stuck with a wonky smartphone on a longer console lifecycle and overpaying for a console with all the limitations of a smartphone.
By contrast - this is a controller with a screen in it. That’s all. Why wouldn’t they sell that? What’s the downside, for them? You buy another accessory priced well beyond its material costs, you provide all the electricity and electronics necessary for it to do anything, and they don’t care if you ever play games on it. It’s not lashed to the success of yet another online store. It’s not even a vehicle for recurring subscription fees. It’s a dongle for another toy. They have no incentive to force it to catch on. If it doesn’t sell - they’ll just stop.
The fact people are buying expensive-ass phones is an obstacle to any console trying to be a cell phone or vice-versa. Phones already play modern-ass video games. Any new iPhone is surely more capable than a Switch. Who’s going to be swayed into buying some custom Sony bullshit just to access an entirely separate wallet vacuum?
If Sony was going to release a handheld, it’d just be an under-powered PS5 variant, as a Nintendo Switch knockoff. AMD would be happy to provide appropriate chips.
IIRC the original Xbox has even worse emulation, to this day, despite being infamously close to a stock PC.
What makes RDR’s emulation struggles noteworthy is that it’s a highly desirable game that still took ages to unfuck. Most nightmare cases for emulators seem to be random D-list titles. Pinball Fantasies on Game Boy had incomprehensible crashes, early and reliably, for no discernible reason. True Crime New York on Gamecube was a white whale for Dolphin despite being absolute garbage.
RDR was a huge deal for its own sake - and it ran bad, looked worse, and stayed that way for a while. Back in the day it was common for emulators to only work properly for big-name games. NESticle and SNES9X absolutely cheated to run major titles. Early N64 development was nothing but. So having this killer app refuse to work, year after year, was a lingering presence in people’s minds.
Finally getting it working, only to have a nearly painless alternative drop, is pretty goddang funny.
Sony's Remote Play handheld Project Q has been renamed PlayStation Portal and will be available for $199 (www.gamescensor.com) angielski
Nintendo Switch emulators Yuzu and Ryujinx can already run Red Dead Redemption on PC (www.dsogaming.com) angielski