PlayStation Portal in 2025: From home streaming dud to cloud streaming star

The PlayStation Portal is the rare product that launched as a truly baffling device, but has evolved into something genuinely useful. At first, it could only stream games from your PlayStation 5, it lacked core features for a handheld like Bluetooth audio and it felt a bit overpriced at $200 for such a limited product. Add on the fact that home streaming can be notoriously unreliable, since it depends entirely on your ISP and home networking setup, and the Portal simply didn't make much sense. But in 2024 Sony finally added limited cloud streaming for PS Plus titles, and last week it went even further by letting you stream games you own directly from the cloud. All of a sudden, the PlayStation Portal doesn't seem so crazy after all.

It also helps that the Portal is still $200 ...