The past few years have demonstrated something once thought impossible: yes, gamers TO DO I want a high-end portable machine that doesn’t say “Nintendo” on the front. The Steam Deck and its many imitators have opened up the portable PC gaming market and are leading to new competition.

According to a new rumor, we might see a familiar face in the portable gaming space. This face is Sony.

Bloomberg says that Sony is seriously looking into a handheld gaming machine for the first time since the PlayStation Vita over a decade ago. Additionally, it wouldn’t be a phone derivative or streaming-only device, like the currently active PlayStation Portal (pictured above). Instead, it’s rumored to be a full-featured PlayStation 5 that you can throw in a bag or plug into a TV, similar to the dual-functionality of the Nintendo Switch. Or the Steam Deck, for that matter.

Details are scarce, but the development is said to have come from the same process that resulted in the somewhat disappointing PlayStation Portal, which was recently updated to enable streaming from Sony’s cloud service. Portal isn’t powerful enough to run PS5 games natively… but the PS5 is now over five years old and uses a custom RDNA2 graphics system.

Although the hardware is extremely custom, it has a lot in common with the AMD RDNA2 chips in the Steam Deck and many alternatives. It’s not hard to imagine Sony looking over the fence at Valve’s success and wondering if the portable gaming market is worth trying again, especially considering the $700 PlayStation 5 Pro arrived like a flop. Making a portable PS5 could be a great way to extend the life of the console and maintain investment in the platform.

By the way, Sony isn’t the only one looking at the portable gaming market with fresh eyes. Rumors of an Xbox handheld have been around almost as long as the Xbox itself, but Microsoft recently said it was looking into the possibility more seriously. That said, the company is still more interested in laptop gaming with its hardware partners like Asus and Lenovo, at least for now.

No company has ever been able to seriously compete with Nintendo’s handheld gaming dominance since the first Game Boy in 1989. That includes the Steam Deck – although it was an unqualified success in market terms PC gaming, it still sells a fraction of the units of Nintendo’s Switch, even after the latter has been around for seven years. But the Steam Deck demonstrates that adults are willing to spend a little more for high-end games on the go, and this is an opportunity for Sony to expanding beyond the home console market.

Bloomberg is generally a reliable source of insider industry information, but none of this is confirmed. Consider it all a rumor for now.