PlayStation's Project Chronos gives Project Q reason to exist

The leak machine at Sony is in full effect this week, with a possible glimpse of the PlayStation Slim/Lite, and news of Project Chronos, a revamped, cutting-edge, streaming project that should make the portable (and confirmed) Project Q more attractive. 

First the new hardware. Leaked imagery from Asia shows a smaller model of PS with added curves and modular connectivity for the optical Blu-ray drive. Otherwise, likely with similar guts, perhaps with a little power saving and cooling across the board as components have got more efficient. 

Here's hoping for an official reveal at Gamescom, but more likely Tokyo Games Show, and some sanity in the pricing! 

Introducing Project Chronos

More importantly, Sony has a big step-up in streaming according to the rumour mill. PlayStation has offered streaming in limited forms since acquiring Gaikai in the 2010s, and embedding that into early PS+ features. 

Since then, Sony has fiddled and diddled without offering a great deal, giving up just where a PS Vita 2 with modern networking stack would have mad portable cloud streaming more of a thing. 

But now the networks are consumer hardware are up to speed, Sony can offer a lot more. Their engineers have been hard at work on the back-end for the last few years, waiting for the stars and marketing to align. Enter Project Chronos, non-ironically likely named after the God of Time!

The first solid sign is in the latest beta of the PS5 firmware, version 8.0, which offers streaming up to 4K for a limited number of games, including Death Stranding as a test of the new service. 

The back-end hardware is based on new network storage services in-part based on some PS5 hardware. These are tied to servers that can offer up to 5GB/s performance with a less than 1 millisecond latency - aka Kura. 

That means Sony can stream games to PS5s or Project Q streaming handhelds across most of Sony's territories, with word of 28 "Kura"-equipped data centres in major regions up to 4K with negligible latency. Which suddenly makes the Q a bit more desirable in the eyes of PlayStation fans who are always on the go. 

Until now Project Q could only stream games from your own PS5 to the portable screen, but with Chronos, players should be able to stream all their own and PS+ games, anywhere, anytime. And if Sony finally gets a decent retro library together, that could be 30 years of legit gaming in your hand. 

Chronos is due to release later this year, likely along with the Project Q, making for a fairly compelling offering. Think a PSQ bundle with a year-long PS+ subscription, so Sony can attract more long-term revenue and perhaps reduce the cost of Project Q to something that would make even the more cynical-minded games (and there are a lot of them) bite. 

Project Q as a mere local streaming gadget made little sense, except to people like me, or limited to one big screen with a family/flatmates in the way. Now it could be quite the smart move, depending on pricing and Sony's ability to overcome or ignore the vitriol aimed at almost any new project.