A friend of mine wrote that Project Q feels like a fake leak from a ‘00s E3 press conference, a fan-designed peripheral that was never prototyped but got everyone all riled up in excitement anyway. Many have speculated that it looks like the Switch OLED has been given official DualSense Joy-Con, but I’d like to point out that Project Q doesn’t even have an OLED screen, just LCD, and that it’s not even bloody portable.
Those of you who’ve read my work before will know that I begrudge both the Steam Deck and the ASUS ROG Ally for their respective lack of portability. This comes entirely thanks to poor battery life on both consoles, even when playing light indie games. To put it in perspective, my Switch OLED lasts around twice as long, managing nearyl ten hours on a full charge, and that console is notorious for its poor battery.
Project Q has a slightly different problem, in that it’s a Wii U with a Sony makeover, except somehow even worse. Project Q uses PlayStation’s Remote Play system to connect to your PS5, kind of like hooking your Wii U pad up to your console but with a little more freedom. The devices connect via Wi-Fi, so while you don’t need to be in sight of the PS5, you’ll need a strong connection to play games on Sony’s handheld at all. This is where the problems arise.
Streaming consoles like the Logitech G Cloud and Abxylute are becoming more common, but they’re not without their pitfalls. If you’re out and about and want to play a game, you need to first find a good Wi-Fi connection. A cafe might be good enough, but considering the loading times when I try to access social media in some places, I think it would struggle to stream a game at any decent framerate. If you’re on a train in the UK – prime gaming time, that – there’s about a 50 percent chance it’ll have Wi-Fi in my experience, and then only a 20 percent chance it actually works. Besides, these things need you to sign away your data to mailing lists in order to log in, something that consoles have traditionally struggled to navigate. You better have a good mobile data plan to hotspot it up.
Speaking of mobile data, your own phone would be far better at streaming than this thing. The screen isn’t quite as big, sure, but it doesn’t need Wi-Fi to stream via the same Remote Play system that Q uses, and its processor will likely be plenty to handle cloud gaming. You can even buy a ten quid case that clips your phone to your DualSense so you can have all that super rumble in the triggers for far less of your hard-earned cash.
Project Q has another problem that your G Clouds and Steam Decks don’t: your PlayStation 5 needs to be turned on. We don’t know the specifics yet, you might be able to stream even if your home console is in sleep mode or something, but the handheld needs a connection to that spaceship sat under your telly in order to play anything. Game streaming already has its problems, and Project Q seems to add an extra hurdle.
On top of all that, the specs don’t even seem very good. A 1080p LCD screen with 60fps? It’s slightly more pixels than the Steam Deck but half the refresh rate of the ROG Ally, with the added caveat that you need an expensive hunk of plastic slurping more energy at all times.
It goes without saying that I don’t see the point in Project Q. It seems like a glorified Wii U, and what reason do we have to believe that Sony’s attempt will work out any better than Nintendo’s failed experiment? It feels like a concept from a decade ago, before most of these technologies and ideas had been tried and failed. It combines the risky tech of cloud streaming – remember how well Stadia went? – while tethering it to a £500 console. It doesn’t sound portable, it doesn’t sound useful, but it might be a decent investment if you can’t bear to leave Spider-Man 2 alone for ten minutes while you take a shit.