DF Direct Q+A: What If PlayStation 6 Is Actually The New PS Portable/Handheld?

**Richard Leadbetter** (0:02)
Hello there, and a warm welcome. We're back with the latest edition of the Digital Foundry Direct Weekly Q&A show. Plenty of interesting topics to get through this week. As always, joining me first of all, Oliver McKenzie. Hello.

**Oliver McKenzie** (0:15)
Yes, a very busy Q&A and a very busy week for us, as I'm sure our audience will soon discover it, or perhaps it's already discovered depending on the publication schedule of this particular video.

**Richard Leadbetter** (0:27)
Indeed. And of course, John Lineman. Hello. You're joining us just before you set off for Gamescom 2026

**John Lineman** (0:35)
That's right. Heading out bright and early in the morning. A lot of good stuff to look forward to. Some cool meetings, cool games to see.
I always love Gamescom. So I'm a little bummed out that you couldn't make it this year, but maybe next time. Yeah, absolutely. Same with Alex as well. But usually it's you and Alex and the three of us get up to no good. And this year it's just me and the people I'm driving up with. One of them is hanging out in the background. So if you see somebody back there, don't mind them.

**Richard Leadbetter** (1:04)
Okay, fair enough. Yeah, I did enjoy last year where basically I ended up getting a heavy cold and had to basically segregate myself from you for the last day.
That was fun, wasn't it?

**John Lineman** (1:14)
Oh, right. Yeah.

**Richard Leadbetter** (1:17)
Okay, so the first question we've got for this particular edition of the show. Well, it's actually two in one. They're basically asking the same question. I'm going to kick off with this one from Just Plain Mike. You keep talking about the portable PlayStation and the PS6 as separate things, but maybe the portable thing actually is the PlayStation 6 The idea here is that one, most gamers don't care at all about graphical improvements above the PS5, as you've discussed at length. The other two, the only way to make a PS6 even slightly affordable is to make it low spec, and three, with the Wii U to switch transition. There's already a track record of a company successfully doing a same powered portable as the successor to a fixed console. Sony could then a few years later release a more powerful and expensive fixed console, the thing that everyone expects the PS6 to be today. As the PS6 Pro, whether the niche audience that cares about graphics would be okay paying high-end money for the extra horsepower, crazy theory or so crazy, it might just work.
This is followed up with a question from Dan Turismo. I'd love to see his birth certificate.
Hey, DF Crew, you said on a recent DF Direct that console SoCs are decided years in advance. And so it's hard for companies like Sony to pivot in response to rising component costs. Could Sony instead opt to shelf Orion and release Canis, the rumored PlayStation handheld, as the PlayStation 6? Effectively following Nintendo's playbook, a lower-powered target with cheaper memory could help keep the console affordable while still offering PlayStation players something new. It could also help to stop development budgets from ballooning any further, and maybe even help them explain away the lack of future dis-support. Curious to hear your thoughts. John, I'm going to go to you first on this one, because obviously, I think you mentioned in the last direct, we've heard some things about the PlayStation portable, handheld thing going back two or three years now.
What do you think about this idea?

**John Lineman** (3:20)
I actually like the idea, but I don't think that's what they're doing. Canis is a separate product, and I think there's also some problems with that, given what we know about its specs and what's even possible right now, in that when they made the jump from Wii U to Switch, the Tegra X1, I guess, could technically produce visuals that outperformed what was possible on Wii U, and the Wii U was somewhat underpowered. That was kind of like a lateral move with some slight upgrade. I don't think you could make a handheld that could support PS5 Pro especially, but even necessarily PS5 level performance, realistically at the size they want with a battery. I think there's too many things that would make that really, really, really difficult to pull off, and I don't think it's going to be that.
And so I don't think they would sell a PS6 that's a portable that is less powerful than the current console. I think it would be a tough sell. And so I don't think they're going to do it. But I do like the idea of them shifting towards that sort of model, and I feel like that could indeed solve some problems. It would explain the lack of disks, it would explain or would help them in territories like Japan where they've been faltering.