We've reported on Microsoft's development of a custom Xbox gaming handheld a number of times, with Microsoft Gaming head, Phil Spencer, recently confirming a foray into hardware was in the works. Now, though, it seems as though Microsoft has shelved the idea for the meantime, instead putting its wei...
Im honestly not sure why they’re making a handheld Xbox after their “everything is an xbox” push. Why have just an Xbox when you can get anything else PLUS an Xbox for likely cheaper?
That’s why they’re doing this. The sleeping dragon is waking up. They’re gonna pour all of their marketing effort into killing the Steam Deck because of the threat it represents for consumer Windows.
If M$ was smart, they’d develop a version of Windows optimized for gaming. But they can’t do that without implying that desktop Windows is inferior for games.
They already have the Xbox framework. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to just use that for gaming and give the handheld the ability to launch a lightweight version of Windows similar to the easy way Steam OS will let you exit to Linux desktop.
There are a lot of edge cases. You have to handle external launchers, external error prompts; basically anything that requires you to Alt+Tab. One of the things Valve did a decade ago was the stuff that got rolled into GameScope that ensures that they never lose focus of the game window. Even with the resources to transform Windows this way, it will still take time.
While I agree that the actual code base needs to be develop and augmented on the backend to make this work, that’s not really what I’m saying. I’m pointing out that they already have the visual design and working template for a handheld based OS ( navigation and so on). Just that coupled with something like what they had with Windows 10 (the tablet interface for 10 was better than 11) would be fine. It could literally be an Xbox version of steam’ big picture mode (because you can launch directly into it from Windows on 10). There even already exists a slimmed down version of Windows 11 to save on resource hogging.
The steam deck has been out long enough for them to have implemented this kind of thing. They’ve had time to design it. They’ve just been using that time to deliberately figure out how to shoehorn AI and telemetry and the rest into it because at the end of the day they still want to siphon up all that data.
I agree. They’ve had time if they cared about making this product before the Steam Deck was a success, but much like with cloud infrastructure, or search engines, or MP3 players, or mobile, or game consoles in general, they only really cared about it after someone else made a great version of what they could have been doing themselves.
The Xbox system is a windows based system optimised to run on the consoles hardware. It has been since launch. Modifying it for handhelds with the ability to navigate to a desktop environment. The addition of a desktop environment isn’t so difficult that it should take three years to accomplish. They launched windows 11 4 years ago and it didn’t take but a few months for them to start shoehorning AI into every crevice of it.
Asus has a product already in production that could be used for the purposes of test bench testing and development. The original ROG Ally is even around the same price point as a steam deck.
So all in all the only two excuses MS has are that they are bad at understanding trends and getting in on the ground floor, and they are bad at optimising windows specifically because that goes against their business plan to gather user data and weaponize that data against their competitors.
All.in all we don’t have an Xbox handheld at this point because they’re greedy and fail to act on trend analysis.
Without implying that desktop Windows wasn’t made with hardware that has neither a keyboard or a mouse in mind? That it wasn’t made to be used on a 7" screen? Sure.
Only in the Linux fanatics minds does it implies that desktop Windows is inferior for games.
It’s not as if people are using the Steam Deck in desktop mode when they want to play games either and the experience on Steam OS in desktop mode if you don’t connect at least a keyboard is pretty shit as well, so I guess that the fact that by default it boots in Steam mode must be a proof that Linux is inferior for games if we follow your logic.
We’re talking about people using a Steam Deck instead so people that are a revenue stream with Stockholm syndrome for yet another billionaire, just one that privately owns his company instead of it being publically traded.
They’re probably building off Windows RT (the locked down variant designed for ARM tablets).
If they were smart they’d imitate some of how SteamOS runs games in a modified WinRT environment - TLDR do NOT start up the entire Win32 runtime and desktop environment by default, don’t run stuff like printer services and whatnot, just run a simplified sandbox and window manager with just the APIs needed to run the games similar to Proton. Then let the user switch to desktop mode as needed, but don’t run it when gaming.
It’s most definitely not. The ROG Crate app is pretty good. And if you spend a few minutes setting up shortcuts, everything becomes a whole lot easier. But I basically never touch the windows layer on my ally anyways.
It’s powerful, but the device isn’t “great.” It suffers from poor ASUS quality control and support. Let’s also not forget the notorious overheating SD card slot because they thought it was a good idea to put it next to the exhaust. It’s a poorly thought out design especially compared to the Steam Deck. Valve’s effort is still the best on the market.
I bought mine used with the SD card slot busted and I still think it’s great. Maybe because I didn’t pay 600 bucks for it!Definitely my favorite handheld ever.
I think the Steam Deck is pretty neat and I love the design of the device itself (I am not enthusiastic about the Ally’s L337G4mer aesthetics, and even less so with the monstrosity above), but for me not having access to Gamepass is a deal breaker so I’d never consider it. Maybe when I fully jump into PC gaming sometime soon I’ll switch my tune. But I digress. Other than the SD issue I’ve found that the ROG Ally is a very capable device and I have seen no other issues with it to be honest. The software it comes with is actually pretty good and makes it so that you don’t have to deal with Windows almost at all. The coolest thing is that you can dock it and you basically have a mid end workstation too.
My fist handheld was the Gameboy Color so it just boggles my mind how far we’ve come.
Right? Handheld PCs are incredible. They’re the best thing about modern gaming, imo. I dock my steam deck to my TV with a wireless kb/m, and it’s my main PC setup. It’s the ultimate minimalist device for PC gamers.
Honestly, and I say that as a 98% Deck player (according to last year Steam Recap), it is starting to lack horsepower.
I really hope the Deck 2 will allow for external GPUs when docked, because E33 really did put it on his knees 😅.
Even at “optimized” settings (which you cannot change on the Deck), I was at 20-30 FPS unless I enabled XeSS. And even then it looked like shit 😅.
That depends a lot on what you’re playing and what your expectations are. I use my Ally to play older games and indies and I feel like it’s great for that. AAA experiences I play on my Xbox Series X.
I have a friend who’s had every handheld and he says they all suck, but he’s expecting to play stuff like COD at high settings and 60fps. That’s just not realistic.
But again I’m coming from growing up with gameboys and Nintendo DS so I don’t have the expectations that someone who grew up in the HD generation might have.
I’m a gameboy era dude, I don’t have that high expectations from a portable console.
To this day I managed to play to most AAA game I throwed at the Deck at an OK quality (low to medium) with good fps (40-45 fps).
But E33 just didn’t want to, and some area looked a lot different than on my 5 year old computer.
The manor, as an example, looks washed out and overexposed, almost white and grey, while on the computer it looked oldish, but acceptable. And I was on low settings on the computer 😅. So either it is currently bugged, or there is an hidden “very low” setting specially made for the Deck.
They already managed to invade Lemmy and complain about SteamOS not supporting a 4090, so its only a matter of time until they start hating linux alltogether
But generally they already do hate Linux, we’re talking about the demographic that considers webp a bad image format because some Windows default applications don’t support it while having no idea what the format is like
Bet that linux vs windows performance video did it in. The exec who thinks linux desktop doesn’t even exist saw this and immediately shat their pants in rage.
So far as I can think, wasn’t the only handheld that failed the Playstation Vita? And that had very visible reasons for the failure - designing itself around an obtuse storage medium, and requiring first-party memory cards. Even with those drawbacks and with no first-party support, it had a tremendous following.
It honestly could still be a worthwhile device to chain off of, since none of the current offerings fit in a pants pocket.
I love the Vita, and you’re right, you can hack it to accept SD Cards, use native PSP/PS1 emulation in any game and a lot of homebrew ports.
PS: If you’re willing to get third party PC Handhelds, the Ayaneo Air 1S is the closest thing the Vita form factor I know. 5.5" OLED screen, but the bezel is thicker and it has longer grips. It’s a 2023 device, so I’m interested to know what they’ll do with the next line of AMD chips
Was a really great emulation handheld till its oen hardware got emulated, then the new nintendo 3ds beat it since theres not good emulation of the 3D effects yet.
Much as I hate Nintendo now, their contribution to gaming can’t be denied. First they revived it from the crash in 1983, then they showed that there’s a market for a hybrid console/handheld device, paving the way for PC handhelds.
Heck a lot of “gimmicks” nintendo was mocked for ended up copied by sony and microsoft. The only reason nintendo is like it is now is cause of copying back the bad practices sony and microsoft pioneered like paying for server connectivity and games not fully being on the physical media that you buy.
I don’t know how much of that was needing to prove that the market existed rather than the simultaneous development of performant and power efficient x64 APUs suitable for handheld gaming PCs. The 3DS was plenty successful even at the time, but handheld-only games had a reputation for being the B game to the home consoles’ A game. It was a pretty natural conclusion for Nintendo, when their handheld was successful and their home console was not, to combine the two, using the same tech found in cell phones, no less.
Hard to say for sure without seeing a timeline where Nintendo didn’t make a hybrid console and seeing if the Steam Deck and other PC handhelds still happened the same way. I’d be surprised if the success of the Switch had absolutely nothing to do with the Steam Deck’s creation, however.
Well, the first GPD Win beat the Switch to market by two years, so I’d be willing to bet it was inevitable. The GPD Win 2 was wildly impressive at the time, coming in at almost Switch level performance, but it could play my Steam games, and I bought one immediately, even at twice the MSRP of the Switch. I’m an earlier adopter for this kind of thing, but I do believe it was just a matter of the tech catching up. Up until that point, the power level of handheld stuff was always woefully behind what home consoles and PCs could do, and now that may still be the case, but we’re still happily playing games that require no more power than what a PS4 can do, which is tech from 12 years ago.
Performance is really a key factor, and gives rise to now being a time when truly competitive handheld is possible. Like this chart shows, there was a quadrupling of power between 2016 and 2020, but only a doubling of power between 2020 and 2023, with stagnation for the last couple years, largely due to technical limitations. RAM and storage have also seen massive boosts followed by stagnation, as well as a closing of the bandwidth gap between RAM and storage (from about 6 orders of magnitude to 3 orders of magnitude difference with solid state storage). The GPU front is still increasing in performance, with more watts and/or transistors giving more power, with raw performance increasing by a factor of 8 over 10 years.
Now you take those base values for performance, and a few things come together. First, storage has become low-energy, and is more performant, especially in the mobile market. Second, lower power CPUs are reasonably competitive, which means longer battery run time at an acceptable performance level. Third, while there is a bigger gap on GPU performance, smaller screens mean fewer pixels to drive so something a little older and less power hungry can still give satisfactory results. Put those all together, coupled with the steady and constant improvements in battery performance over the last 30 years, and you can make an acceptable mobile computer platform with decent results that’s able to play all but the most demanding of games from the last few years. Certainly, you can’t compete with the power of a desktop gaming PC, but you can get good enough. And then, with a few design tweaks, you can get a little better.
So, until and unless serious changes happen in the CPU or GPU market, mobile PC gaming has a chance to be good enough for a lot of people. I currently do over 90% of my gaming on the Steam Deck, but I’m also aware that I have little interest in playing the newest game as soon as it comes out so the Steam Deck is particularly suited to my tastes.
I wouldn’t consider the GPD Win in the same category because it was not designed to easily switch between being hooked up to a big screen or used portably. It’s a palmtop computer with a controller embedded in it, not a hybrid. Being able to hook it up to a screen is an afterthought.
Define “easily”. The Steam Deck doesn’t come with a dock. They’re all just personal computers, and as such, they don’t need to be explicitly designed for certain functionality in many cases. Plus, I’d argue one of the core pillars is that it plays the same games at home and on the go, without having to purchase a second portable version of it.
There’s a massive catalog of 3ds exclusives and those drove the market, not the adaptations or ports. The latter were the minority and not even the most popular titles.
Not an adaptation or port, but the Link Between Worlds compared to the console’s Breath of the Wild. Say what you will about the subjective quality of each of those games, but the market at large would prefer Breath of the Wild. Plus Sony’s catalog had this problem even more visibly on Vita.
4.26 million copies sold, 17 best game awards and critical acclaim as the fourth best game for the 3DS disagree. The game also predates Breath of the wild by four years. I don’t know anyone else who compares the two directly. The LoZ games had always, until the Switch, been defined as existing in two distinct lines, the handheld games and the console games. I was thinking more of games like Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater, Ocarina of Time, Splinter Cell, The Sims, or Resident Evil Revelations who were more direct ports. And that’s even with a caveat, as RER was released for 3DS first then ported to consoles, and other ports were purpose made remakes that conserved the gameplay loop but were otherwise heavily adapted.
The 3DS has more that 1800 games, and most of them are exclusives.
You’re making an argument that I am not. I never said the 3DS or its games weren’t successful; in fact, I said it was more successful than the Wii U, which likely led to the Switch being a logical thing for Nintendo to do. I never said its biggest games were ports. But while that 4.26M copies is no slouch, it’s in line with how Echoes of Wisdom or the remake of A Link to the Past have performed and not the 30M+ copies that Breath of the Wild sold. The former have smaller budgets and less mass market appeal (though it would be wildly impressive for just about any other series). They are the B games to Breath of the Wild’s or Tears of the Kingdom’s A games. That’s what handheld libraries typically were, especially up until the point that it was clear that the Wii U was a dud.
To use another example that will maybe help convey my point better: The 3DS got Hey! Pikmin. The Wii U got Pikmin 3.
“Let” is that the wrong word. Microsoft was setup specifically to make BASIC for the Altair. DOS they stumbled into because CP/M dropped the ball. Every other product, they’ve been chasing new markets that they didn’t think of being in.
I’m critical about Xbox handheld/portable because it was so obvious that that’s where the demand would come from.
However, they’ve been better at monetizing their other software and services better than anyone else though.
My point here is that none of these cases feature Microsoft inventing a brand new product and trying to market it for the first time. Their whole strategy from the very beginning was to look for existing products with existing markets and try to conquer them. They even had a name for a variant of this strategy (targeted at open standards) which the US DoJ famously discovered during the antitrust trial:
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Cool. I’ll just be over here happily playing my Steam Deck.
Maybe even get Xbox gamepass on it.
Im honestly not sure why they’re making a handheld Xbox after their “everything is an xbox” push. Why have just an Xbox when you can get anything else PLUS an Xbox for likely cheaper?
That’s why they’re doing this. The sleeping dragon is waking up. They’re gonna pour all of their marketing effort into killing the Steam Deck because of the threat it represents for consumer Windows.
They have no leverage, no exclusive games and their DirectX moat is filled by Proton/Vulkan
At this rate they should brand it as a Zune device.
They would instantly have my attention. The Zune was dope.
God Microsoft is just taking so many L’s. How can they make so much money and be so bad at managing Xbox?
If M$ was smart, they’d develop a version of Windows optimized for gaming. But they can’t do that without implying that desktop Windows is inferior for games.
They already have the Xbox framework. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to just use that for gaming and give the handheld the ability to launch a lightweight version of Windows similar to the easy way Steam OS will let you exit to Linux desktop.
There are a lot of edge cases. You have to handle external launchers, external error prompts; basically anything that requires you to Alt+Tab. One of the things Valve did a decade ago was the stuff that got rolled into GameScope that ensures that they never lose focus of the game window. Even with the resources to transform Windows this way, it will still take time.
While I agree that the actual code base needs to be develop and augmented on the backend to make this work, that’s not really what I’m saying. I’m pointing out that they already have the visual design and working template for a handheld based OS ( navigation and so on). Just that coupled with something like what they had with Windows 10 (the tablet interface for 10 was better than 11) would be fine. It could literally be an Xbox version of steam’ big picture mode (because you can launch directly into it from Windows on 10). There even already exists a slimmed down version of Windows 11 to save on resource hogging.
The steam deck has been out long enough for them to have implemented this kind of thing. They’ve had time to design it. They’ve just been using that time to deliberately figure out how to shoehorn AI and telemetry and the rest into it because at the end of the day they still want to siphon up all that data.
I agree. They’ve had time if they cared about making this product before the Steam Deck was a success, but much like with cloud infrastructure, or search engines, or MP3 players, or mobile, or game consoles in general, they only really cared about it after someone else made a great version of what they could have been doing themselves.
The Xbox system is a windows based system optimised to run on the consoles hardware. It has been since launch. Modifying it for handhelds with the ability to navigate to a desktop environment. The addition of a desktop environment isn’t so difficult that it should take three years to accomplish. They launched windows 11 4 years ago and it didn’t take but a few months for them to start shoehorning AI into every crevice of it.
Asus has a product already in production that could be used for the purposes of test bench testing and development. The original ROG Ally is even around the same price point as a steam deck.
So all in all the only two excuses MS has are that they are bad at understanding trends and getting in on the ground floor, and they are bad at optimising windows specifically because that goes against their business plan to gather user data and weaponize that data against their competitors.
All.in all we don’t have an Xbox handheld at this point because they’re greedy and fail to act on trend analysis.
Eh… No
Without implying that desktop Windows wasn’t made with hardware that has neither a keyboard or a mouse in mind? That it wasn’t made to be used on a 7" screen? Sure.
Only in the Linux fanatics minds does it implies that desktop Windows is inferior for games.
It’s not as if people are using the Steam Deck in desktop mode when they want to play games either and the experience on Steam OS in desktop mode if you don’t connect at least a keyboard is pretty shit as well, so I guess that the fact that by default it boots in Steam mode must be a proof that Linux is inferior for games if we follow your logic.
I’d rather be a fanatic than a revenue stream with Stockholm syndrome.
We’re talking about people using a Steam Deck instead so people that are a revenue stream with Stockholm syndrome for yet another billionaire, just one that privately owns his company instead of it being publically traded.
They’re probably building off Windows RT (the locked down variant designed for ARM tablets).
If they were smart they’d imitate some of how SteamOS runs games in a modified WinRT environment - TLDR do NOT start up the entire Win32 runtime and desktop environment by default, don’t run stuff like printer services and whatnot, just run a simplified sandbox and window manager with just the APIs needed to run the games similar to Proton. Then let the user switch to desktop mode as needed, but don’t run it when gaming.
I’m guessing this is basically how the Xbox works already.
It’s not so much Win32 though on Xbox, the biggest similarity is the x86 CPU and the shared kernel and some security stuff
Edit: forgot the obvious, DirectX
That is literally what they’re doing.
And failing, apparently
There is absolutely zero chance a windows handheld gaming device succeeds, what the actual fuck are they thinking, lol.
What do you mean? The ROG Ally has been successful. It’s a great device.
It’s a great device once you get windows off it; which is a chore. It’s unusable with Windows.
It’s most definitely not. The ROG Crate app is pretty good. And if you spend a few minutes setting up shortcuts, everything becomes a whole lot easier. But I basically never touch the windows layer on my ally anyways.
It’s powerful, but the device isn’t “great.” It suffers from poor ASUS quality control and support. Let’s also not forget the notorious overheating SD card slot because they thought it was a good idea to put it next to the exhaust. It’s a poorly thought out design especially compared to the Steam Deck. Valve’s effort is still the best on the market.
So nothing Windows related
I bought mine used with the SD card slot busted and I still think it’s great. Maybe because I didn’t pay 600 bucks for it!Definitely my favorite handheld ever.
I think the Steam Deck is pretty neat and I love the design of the device itself (I am not enthusiastic about the Ally’s L337G4mer aesthetics, and even less so with the monstrosity above), but for me not having access to Gamepass is a deal breaker so I’d never consider it. Maybe when I fully jump into PC gaming sometime soon I’ll switch my tune. But I digress. Other than the SD issue I’ve found that the ROG Ally is a very capable device and I have seen no other issues with it to be honest. The software it comes with is actually pretty good and makes it so that you don’t have to deal with Windows almost at all. The coolest thing is that you can dock it and you basically have a mid end workstation too.
My fist handheld was the Gameboy Color so it just boggles my mind how far we’ve come.
Right? Handheld PCs are incredible. They’re the best thing about modern gaming, imo. I dock my steam deck to my TV with a wireless kb/m, and it’s my main PC setup. It’s the ultimate minimalist device for PC gamers.
Honestly, and I say that as a 98% Deck player (according to last year Steam Recap), it is starting to lack horsepower.
I really hope the Deck 2 will allow for external GPUs when docked, because E33 really did put it on his knees 😅. Even at “optimized” settings (which you cannot change on the Deck), I was at 20-30 FPS unless I enabled XeSS. And even then it looked like shit 😅.
That depends a lot on what you’re playing and what your expectations are. I use my Ally to play older games and indies and I feel like it’s great for that. AAA experiences I play on my Xbox Series X.
I have a friend who’s had every handheld and he says they all suck, but he’s expecting to play stuff like COD at high settings and 60fps. That’s just not realistic.
But again I’m coming from growing up with gameboys and Nintendo DS so I don’t have the expectations that someone who grew up in the HD generation might have.
I’m a gameboy era dude, I don’t have that high expectations from a portable console.
To this day I managed to play to most AAA game I throwed at the Deck at an OK quality (low to medium) with good fps (40-45 fps).
But E33 just didn’t want to, and some area looked a lot different than on my 5 year old computer.
The manor, as an example, looks washed out and overexposed, almost white and grey, while on the computer it looked oldish, but acceptable. And I was on low settings on the computer 😅. So either it is currently bugged, or there is an hidden “very low” setting specially made for the Deck.
Dont overestimate the power of the Lobotomites.
They already managed to invade Lemmy and complain about SteamOS not supporting a 4090, so its only a matter of time until they start hating linux alltogether
But generally they already do hate Linux, we’re talking about the demographic that considers webp a bad image format because some Windows default applications don’t support it while having no idea what the format is like
Why does this thing look like it fell into a ravine.
When you start from Windows NT and vibe code for 31 years.
Bet that linux vs windows performance video did it in. The exec who thinks linux desktop doesn’t even exist saw this and immediately shat their pants in rage.
It’s their own fault they couldn’t see a demand for handheld gaming.
To be fair, every company was sure handhelds would die and mobile games would take over everything. Then the Switch happened.
So far as I can think, wasn’t the only handheld that failed the Playstation Vita? And that had very visible reasons for the failure - designing itself around an obtuse storage medium, and requiring first-party memory cards. Even with those drawbacks and with no first-party support, it had a tremendous following.
It honestly could still be a worthwhile device to chain off of, since none of the current offerings fit in a pants pocket.
I love the Vita, and you’re right, you can hack it to accept SD Cards, use native PSP/PS1 emulation in any game and a lot of homebrew ports.
PS: If you’re willing to get third party PC Handhelds, the Ayaneo Air 1S is the closest thing the Vita form factor I know. 5.5" OLED screen, but the bezel is thicker and it has longer grips. It’s a 2023 device, so I’m interested to know what they’ll do with the next line of AMD chips
Was a really great emulation handheld till its oen hardware got emulated, then the new nintendo 3ds beat it since theres not good emulation of the 3D effects yet.
Much as I hate Nintendo now, their contribution to gaming can’t be denied. First they revived it from the crash in 1983, then they showed that there’s a market for a hybrid console/handheld device, paving the way for PC handhelds.
Heck a lot of “gimmicks” nintendo was mocked for ended up copied by sony and microsoft. The only reason nintendo is like it is now is cause of copying back the bad practices sony and microsoft pioneered like paying for server connectivity and games not fully being on the physical media that you buy.
The loss of Reggie and Iwata are sorely felt. Nintendo is just run by generic corporate suits now, and it really shows.
I don’t know how much of that was needing to prove that the market existed rather than the simultaneous development of performant and power efficient x64 APUs suitable for handheld gaming PCs. The 3DS was plenty successful even at the time, but handheld-only games had a reputation for being the B game to the home consoles’ A game. It was a pretty natural conclusion for Nintendo, when their handheld was successful and their home console was not, to combine the two, using the same tech found in cell phones, no less.
Hard to say for sure without seeing a timeline where Nintendo didn’t make a hybrid console and seeing if the Steam Deck and other PC handhelds still happened the same way. I’d be surprised if the success of the Switch had absolutely nothing to do with the Steam Deck’s creation, however.
Well, the first GPD Win beat the Switch to market by two years, so I’d be willing to bet it was inevitable. The GPD Win 2 was wildly impressive at the time, coming in at almost Switch level performance, but it could play my Steam games, and I bought one immediately, even at twice the MSRP of the Switch. I’m an earlier adopter for this kind of thing, but I do believe it was just a matter of the tech catching up. Up until that point, the power level of handheld stuff was always woefully behind what home consoles and PCs could do, and now that may still be the case, but we’re still happily playing games that require no more power than what a PS4 can do, which is tech from 12 years ago.
Performance is really a key factor, and gives rise to now being a time when truly competitive handheld is possible. Like this chart shows, there was a quadrupling of power between 2016 and 2020, but only a doubling of power between 2020 and 2023, with stagnation for the last couple years, largely due to technical limitations. RAM and storage have also seen massive boosts followed by stagnation, as well as a closing of the bandwidth gap between RAM and storage (from about 6 orders of magnitude to 3 orders of magnitude difference with solid state storage). The GPU front is still increasing in performance, with more watts and/or transistors giving more power, with raw performance increasing by a factor of 8 over 10 years.
Now you take those base values for performance, and a few things come together. First, storage has become low-energy, and is more performant, especially in the mobile market. Second, lower power CPUs are reasonably competitive, which means longer battery run time at an acceptable performance level. Third, while there is a bigger gap on GPU performance, smaller screens mean fewer pixels to drive so something a little older and less power hungry can still give satisfactory results. Put those all together, coupled with the steady and constant improvements in battery performance over the last 30 years, and you can make an acceptable mobile computer platform with decent results that’s able to play all but the most demanding of games from the last few years. Certainly, you can’t compete with the power of a desktop gaming PC, but you can get good enough. And then, with a few design tweaks, you can get a little better.
So, until and unless serious changes happen in the CPU or GPU market, mobile PC gaming has a chance to be good enough for a lot of people. I currently do over 90% of my gaming on the Steam Deck, but I’m also aware that I have little interest in playing the newest game as soon as it comes out so the Steam Deck is particularly suited to my tastes.
I wouldn’t consider the GPD Win in the same category because it was not designed to easily switch between being hooked up to a big screen or used portably. It’s a palmtop computer with a controller embedded in it, not a hybrid. Being able to hook it up to a screen is an afterthought.
Define “easily”. The Steam Deck doesn’t come with a dock. They’re all just personal computers, and as such, they don’t need to be explicitly designed for certain functionality in many cases. Plus, I’d argue one of the core pillars is that it plays the same games at home and on the go, without having to purchase a second portable version of it.
There’s a massive catalog of 3ds exclusives and those drove the market, not the adaptations or ports. The latter were the minority and not even the most popular titles.
Not an adaptation or port, but the Link Between Worlds compared to the console’s Breath of the Wild. Say what you will about the subjective quality of each of those games, but the market at large would prefer Breath of the Wild. Plus Sony’s catalog had this problem even more visibly on Vita.
4.26 million copies sold, 17 best game awards and critical acclaim as the fourth best game for the 3DS disagree. The game also predates Breath of the wild by four years. I don’t know anyone else who compares the two directly. The LoZ games had always, until the Switch, been defined as existing in two distinct lines, the handheld games and the console games. I was thinking more of games like Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater, Ocarina of Time, Splinter Cell, The Sims, or Resident Evil Revelations who were more direct ports. And that’s even with a caveat, as RER was released for 3DS first then ported to consoles, and other ports were purpose made remakes that conserved the gameplay loop but were otherwise heavily adapted.
The 3DS has more that 1800 games, and most of them are exclusives.
You’re making an argument that I am not. I never said the 3DS or its games weren’t successful; in fact, I said it was more successful than the Wii U, which likely led to the Switch being a logical thing for Nintendo to do. I never said its biggest games were ports. But while that 4.26M copies is no slouch, it’s in line with how Echoes of Wisdom or the remake of A Link to the Past have performed and not the 30M+ copies that Breath of the Wild sold. The former have smaller budgets and less mass market appeal (though it would be wildly impressive for just about any other series). They are the B games to Breath of the Wild’s or Tears of the Kingdom’s A games. That’s what handheld libraries typically were, especially up until the point that it was clear that the Wii U was a dud.
To use another example that will maybe help convey my point better: The 3DS got Hey! Pikmin. The Wii U got Pikmin 3.
Anyone that has ever played a game on a phone knew that would never happen.
And how many years since the Switch? Even the Steam Deck was an open secret for years.
This is how Microsoft has operated since day 1:
“Let” is that the wrong word. Microsoft was setup specifically to make BASIC for the Altair. DOS they stumbled into because CP/M dropped the ball. Every other product, they’ve been chasing new markets that they didn’t think of being in.
I’m critical about Xbox handheld/portable because it was so obvious that that’s where the demand would come from.
However, they’ve been better at monetizing their other software and services better than anyone else though.
My point here is that none of these cases feature Microsoft inventing a brand new product and trying to market it for the first time. Their whole strategy from the very beginning was to look for existing products with existing markets and try to conquer them. They even had a name for a variant of this strategy (targeted at open standards) which the US DoJ famously discovered during the antitrust trial:
Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.