PS5 cloud streaming is coming soon—and fans are mostly concerned about Portal

The new cloud streaming feature for the PlayStation 5 will launch this month for PlayStation Plus Premium members, Sony announced today. 

The feature will allow PlayStation 5 users (with Plus Premium members getting the first crack at it) to stream supported digital games from the Playstation catalog and game trials, as well as any supported PS5 games in the catalog that subscribers already own. 

According to a PlayStation blog post by senior vice president of platform experience Hideaki Nishino, certain big games will be available to stream when this feature launches and Sony plans to add “hundreds of PS5 titles to support this new benefit.” Some of the games subscribers will get to stream off the bat include Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Horizon Forbidden West, Ghost of Tsushima, Mortal Kombat 11, and Saints Row IV. Plus members will also be able to check out game trials for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and The Calisto Protocol.

The fan reaction to this announcement was surprisingly less focused on the feature itself, or at least on the PlayStation 5 version of it. In the replies to the PlayStation account’s tweet announcement, dozens of people are asking variants of the same question: Will it work with PlayStation Portal?

PlayStation Portal is the “remote player” device Sony announced for the PS5 back in May. It looks like a split-in-half PS5 controller with a screen sandwiched in the middle. The Portal as announced has several limitations, one of which is that your actual PS5 console has to be on to use it. Both devices also have to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network. 

That connectivity requirement makes it so you can’t play while away from home, which seems like it would limit the Portal’s appeal. But the prospect of cloud streaming on the handheld device seems to alleviate that pain point for a lot of folks. 

Unfortunately for them, the Portal doesn’t actually seem to support cloud streaming. The PlayStation blog post that announced the Portal pretty explicitly says it doesn’t, in fact.

“PS VR2 games, which require the headset, and games that are streamed through PlayStation Plus Premium’s cloud streaming, are not supported,” the post reads.

It looks like PlayStation may have shot itself in the foot with this decision as cloud streaming currently seems like the Portal’s main attraction factor.