Sony files patent for new handheld that looks a lot like a Nintendo Switch

By Imad Khan February 19, 2017

sony handheld patent switch 6695130949 0ee9f19f18 b cropped — Sergey Galyonkin/Flickr

For gamers who are in love with their PS Vita’s there might be hope for the future.

Sony has filed a patent for what looks to be a new portable handheld system, and it looks like it has taken quite a few design cues from the Nintendo Switch.

NeoGAF user ponpo is the one who spotted the patent. It was apparently filed in 2015, but has just recently become public.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

It certainly doesn’t look as elegant as a PS Vita, but it does trade sleek design for a greater ergonomic feel. What it does look like is some sort of tablet device that’s sitting in a controller mount. It actually looks most similar to the Gamepad Controller for the Razer Edge Pro Gaming Tablet. While the tablet might also resemble a phone, the patent photos suggest very little if any parts are removable.

This patent comes as a major surprise to Sony handheld fans. Especially after head of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, confirmed in 2015 that with the advent of mobile phones, the climate for dedicated gaming handhelds was not healthy.

While the PS Vita is beloved for its treasure trove of obscure Japanese titles, it hasn’t sold particularly well. Since its release in late 2011 in Japan, the PS Vita has sold a total of 15.25 million units. That’s a far cry from Sony’s previous handheld, the PlayStation Portable, which sold 80.82 million units. Even compared to the Nintendo 3DS, with 63.82 million units sold, the PS Vita has not kept pace.

If Sony were to release this handheld, it would also invariably be compared to Nintendo’s next console/handheld hybrid, the Switch. With so much positive buzz and excitement around the Switch, it may be hard for Sony to carve out a slice of an already highly competitive mobile market pie.

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Gaming

Don’t expect Zelda’s $70 price to become the new Switch standard, says Nintendo

Link looks at his hand in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be Nintendo's first Switch game to be priced at $70. News that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to one of the bestselling and most critically acclaimed titles on the system, will have an increased price compared to its predecessor came as a surprise over three-and-a-half years after its announcement. It also raised questions about what the future of pricing for Nintendo games will be, especially as Sony, Microsoft, and third-party publishers all upped the cost of their new games in recent years.
While Nintendo will release Tears of Kingdom at $70, a spokesperson for the company tells Digital Trends that this will not always be the case for its first-party games going forward.
"No," the spokesperson said when Digital Trends asked if this is a new standard. "We determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis."
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To get more insight into the price shift, I spoke to Omdia Principal Analyst George Jijiashvili, who explains what has caused the price of games to go up in recent years and how Tears of the Kingdom demonstrates that Nintendo will "remain flexible about first-party title pricing." Ultimately, Nintendo fans are finally starting to feel the impact of inflation that's been sweeping across the game industry, even if it's only "on a case-by-case basis" for now.
The price is right
Nintendo claims that not every one of its significant first-party game will be $70, and we can actually already see that in action. Preorders just went live for Pikmin 4, which launches on July 21, after Tears of the Kingdom, and it only costs $60. Still, Zelda's price tag indicates that going forward, Nintendo will at least consider raising the price of its most anticipated games to $70. But why start with Tears of the Kingdom?
When asked why it chose Tears of the Kingdom as its first $70 Nintendo Switch game, a Nintendo spokesperson simply reiterated that the company will "determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." Still, it's a surprising choice for Nintendo to make that pricing change to just one exclusive game almost six years into the Switch's life span. Jijiashvili thinks the choice to do this with Tears of the Kingdom was a pretty apparent one for Nintendo, although it won't apply to everything going forward.
"If you are going to make a game $70, it's going to be the follow-up to one of your most critically acclaimed and bestselling games ever," Jijiashvili tells Digital Trends. "I don’t think that this means that $70 will become the standard price for all major Nintendo releases. It's worth noting that Metroid Prime Remastered is priced at $40. It's clear that Nintendo will remain flexible about first-party title pricing."

It makes basic financial sense for Nintendo to ask for a little bit more for a game it knows will be one of the biggest releases of 2023. But what factors in the game industry and world's economy at large caused Nintendo to make this decision?
Priced Out
For more than a decade, people got comfortable with AAA video games being priced at $60. Of course, there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but it was seen as an industry standard until the dawn of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Publisher 2K was one of the first to announce a price increase, and companies like EA, Sony, and Microsoft have all followed suit. Jijiashvili chalks this up to inflation-related pressure on game publishers.
"The games industry has already been experiencing a lot of inflationary pressure," he explains. "AAA games are much more expensive to make now than they used to be, but prices have actually been declining in inflation-adjusted terms -- if prices had risen with inflation since 1990, they would now be over $90. On top of that, we’ve had a big burst of general inflation, meaning that publishers are looking at big increases in everything from salaries to tools. It’s going to be really hard for most publishers to avoid passing on all those extra costs at some point."
Jijiashvili provided us with a graphic created by Omdia that "shows what the typical price points for each generation would look like if you adjusted for inflation." As you can see, the inflation-adjusted prices are only exponentially growing, and the big game pricing shifts the graph highlights were all technically not even enough to keep up with inflation when they happened.

Gaming

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This is according to a report from IGN citing multiple sources, who claimed the companies won’t be a part of the show or make appearances on the floor at the Los Angeles Convention Center in any way. Their absence from this year’s E3, especially Nintendo’s, may come as a shock to the gaming community, but it's not such a surprise when looking at the past few iterations of E3. Even before the pandemic locked everyone down in 2020, Sony and Xbox had been hosting their own E3-style livestreams, so it was more likely they would do it again this year anyway. Nintendo, on the other hand, managed to show off its upcoming games via Nintendo Direct streams and at its booth, console kiosks and all.

Gaming

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Jazz Chisholm's cover art for MLB The Show 23.

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So far, there's not a lot that actually seems new about MLB The Show 23, but this reveal concludes the genesis of a new era for the long-running baseball series. MLB The Show 23 will be released for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch on March 28.