Eh, a handheld that only plays PS4 games wouldn’t really be that appealing at this point, unless Sony keeps making games for it, which I very much doubt. It would need to be able to play PS5 games, but that‘s just not possible yet, and won’t be for many more years.
MS on the other hand might actually be in a position to do something like this, once it‘s feasible to shrink the SoC in the Series S into a handheld form factor. It might be possible on a 2nm process, which is only a few years away. If they do that, they‘d have a portable device that not only plays last gen games, but also current gen games, as well as a huge library of backwards compatible titles from all past XBox generations. In that case, having a low-power SKU like the Series S on the market would‘ve turned out to be an advantage.
I actually think something like this is the only way MS could ever hope to beat Sony again in terms of market share, or even to become market leader one day. Thanks to diminishing returns, tech will soon reach a point where to the casual observer mobile graphics look almost as good as PC/console graphics. I mean, once a handheld is capable of graphics like we saw in the Matrix demo (which did run on Series S too after all), a majority of the market won’t really care that much about further graphical jumps.
In short, I think MS are in a perfect position to copy Nintendo‘s hybrid approach, thanks to the Series S. Who knows, maybe that‘s what they planned from the start.
