- 0 Posts
- 169 Comments
They may very well be on to something (anyone who thought about this for a bit after the first announcement, could figure out this strategy, but it doesn’t include an important factor). Xbox is predominantly a console that lives in the living room. The most expensive Xbox series x is currently available is $729.99. The handheld they modeled this off is currently $899.99. The price increase when this handheld and it’s predecessor consoles have been popular in majority US markets, during a financially unstable time where there exist things like the switch 2 and the Lenovo Legion series of handhelds, not to mention ROG’s other handhelds may make this untenable to consumers. It’s a great idea for them to drop a handheld with an Xbox interface. It’s not a good time.
None of those guys were particularly happy with the original slate of handhelds from everything I watched. Steve and Linus especially seemed to quibble a lot over performance and battery life. I watched so many reviews before I bought a handheld and I ended up not really enjoying the Legion Go I originally bought. It’s lovely but it’s way too big. So I ended up giving it away to my sister (who doesn’t use it as a handheld but as an entertainment center PC), and I bought myself the Ally X.
For sure though we can at least trust that Steve and Linus and Dave will put out reliable benchmarks. So there’s that.
The real question is if this is will be available for other windows handhelds. If it is, people who already have a first or second Gen ROG Ally /X will likely not upgrade. 30% increases in chip performance sounds great on paper but don’t necessarily mean anything in real world use depending on games and other specs. I can’t say because I don’t play a whole lot of AAA games on my ROG Ally X, but my opinion is that it’s unlikely to make enough of a difference to get me to buy the new one. That’s probably true for most of the people who own a handheld (including the steam deck). The suspend feature is useful, and the Xbox os optimization of windows sounds great, but I want to see side by side specs and benchmarks, and I want to know how upgradeable this thing is. You can already get a 2TB ROG Ally X for just under $1000. Is this thing gonna come in a 2TB variant? Can I dual boot steam os? Will changing the edition of windows (home to pro) lock me out of the Xbox style interface? I have lots of questions.
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.
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 find it funny that Cozy Grove is exactly the kind of cozy game hiding a really sinister plot title they’re talking about but there’s no mention of it. You know, the game where you (a girl scout style spirit guide) get sent to an island all by yourself for your first scouting adventure and then shipwreck, essential marooning you on an island, and your Troup leader then realizes she sent you to the wrong island but not to worry, she’ll rally to recover you. Eventually. If she remembers and can figure out where you are. In the meantime she’ll comfort your parents as best she can and remind them they signed a waiver and can’t sue. Just you know. Help the spirits that haunt the island you’re on until rescue arrives. If you can get them to move on, more power to you, you can have a badge for that.
Either you haven’t read into what Nintendo is doing and kept up with what’s been going on in the court case, (and perhaps meant to put a /s at the end of your first comment), or you’re blaming Palworld for something Nintendo did because they are big mad that anyone would dare make a game even remotely similar to theirs. I don’t care if you’re defending Nintendo or not.
NINTENDO LITERALLY APPLIED FOR PATENTS FOR GAME MECHANICS used in Palworld after the game was already released to the public. They invented a reason to sue. They directly manufactured it. Your inability to communicate your thoughts on the matter is not my problem. Maybe stop raving for a minute and compose a reply that actually makes sense.
So, Nintendo can file patents after years of not filing them just to fuck with an Indie company after that company put out a product with game mechanics that “infringe said patents”, but not to go after other large gaming companies like Microsoft that also infringe those same patents. Interesting take.
I’m just going to point out some things.
-1: The comparison comes from price point and the fact that both systems are handheld play anywhere systems with docking capability for couch play.
-2: There are already arguably better spec’s handhelds in this category that would outperform both these systems, but the cost of them is largely a deciding factor and it comes with some tradeoffs that include OS (since these are windows only handhelds with the exception of the Legion Go S, meaning that if you don’t want windows you have to go to the added trouble of installing something like Bazzite).
-3: We know that just about every handheld on the market has some tradeoffs. The Legion Go has a beautiful screen and joycon-like detachable controllers. But it’s also heavier than the switch, and the steam deck and arguably less comfortable to hold for some. We know the the original ROG Ally had a bunch of problems including the fact that it would destroy its own SD card slot and potentially any SD card installed in it. It’s newest iteration is great (lots of fixes, better GPU/CPU, larger SDD, better battery life, better ergonomics, fixed SD card slot etc), however it’s also close to $1000. The Legion Go S has different storage capacities depending on which OS you chose at launch. Even now there’s different variants that give different performance at different price points (Z1 extreme vs Z2 Go). The Switch OG lacks emulation for a lot of newer games (Wii and DS games specifically). Those games are coming probably but they are available on other handhelds with just a little bit of extra work.
-4: Ease of play and ease of emulation are things people who aren’t buying these devices to tinker want. So the Switch 2 wins there. Just buy the subscription and you can emulate quite a lot of their gaming library with more to come.
-5: Expecting a publication largely catering to the fans of Nintendo to offer up its competition as the better bargain for the money is just… Silly. It doesn’t make sense.
The switch 2 doesn’t add enough things to the table to make me want to spend $450+ to buy it. It’s launch titles are not particularly compelling for me, and when you add their anti-emulation litigation to the pile and DCMA abuse, I just don’t feel like it’s something I’m currently willing to buy. On top of that there’s lots of accessibility improvements I would love to see including joycon styles for 2D platformers that include a real D pad, GameCube style Joycons, or even just Joycons that would allow those with partial impairment or disability to have greater access to their gaming library. There’s a lot of unexplored territory for the design and execution of this product that doesn’t include better graphics or being able to play cyberpunk 2077 and I think people forget that. Can you get such things on a steam deck? Yeah. Probably. But not natively docked to the system in handheld mode.
It’s a bad time for an increase economically. But when you realize that we have been paying $60 USD for games since at least the 90’s and $60 in 90’s money is something like $150 in 2025 money, you realize just how good we’ve had it for a long time. And then take into account that games have become more and more expensive to make (yeah yeah I understand that a lot of the cost is down to a lot of non-game development relevant jobs), you don’t start to wonder why they didn’t increase prices before?
I’m not saying we like it. I’m saying that anyone who’s given it some thought can see why they might want to increase prices.
Some of them are just fine with the switch 2 hardware and even understand that game prices have been stagnant for some time. But Nintendo has been constantly showing us they aren’t a company we want to continue to support and if you couple that with affordability you’re gonna have a bad time.
They’re charging $90 for a game that plays better on non-oem hardware than it did on it’s original intended hardware, a game a lot of fans have already bought (who would still need to pay an additional $10 fee just to get the game running the way it probably should have run from the start).
I mean this in the best possible way, but Nintendo fans are avid collectors and they want this, but Nintendo dissuades them in multiple ways from showing support.
It’s the tracking vs utility conundrum. At the start people kind of knew that Google was gathering their information in return for free services like Gmail etc. And those services were useful/didn’t show significant drawbacks etc.
But with Microsoft (who historically have allowed local accounts since the start and have comparatively only recently required or pushed for a linked account), the detriments are evident to people who use their computers for more than just surfing the web and watching Netflix or Tik Tok. It rubs them the wrong way when they have to connect a computer to the Internet to even set it up.
Some people don’t live in a place where internet is a standard. Others don’t necessarily want to set up a computer for themselves but for their small business or their aging grandma or for their kid (who can’t legally sign up for anything but a child’s account and that’s significantly locked down in ways that maybe the adult doesn’t want to deal with).
Some people work in fields where they have a different threat model and don’t want Microsoft or other companies siphoning up their private data. Some of them are still forced to use Microsoft products because of work etc.
The thing is though, people should have the choice when they are buying a product that will belong to them about what that product does and how it functions. And the vast majority of people who do want that choice are against this measure and measures like it.
Just about everyone I know who has the latest gen Xbox had trouble acquiring one. The pandemic messed up the launch of both games and the manufacture/availability of the consoles and unlike the switch and PS5 (which have worldwide popularity), the Xbox just never seems to have recovered because Americans went from a point in time where they had a lot more free time and potentially money (with the stimulus), right back to the grind with stagnant wages and housing crisis etc. Can’t say I’m surprised that it’s not selling well these days.
It does however report other handhelds as steam decks if they’re running steam OS or another Linux distro for the purposes of base statistics which I think is why people keep saying this.
I don’t personally own a steam deck but I do own a rog ally x with Bazzite and my gaming is labeled as steam deck as a result.
I don’t know if I’d considered it a board game, but the Forbidden Island game (and the others like it) spring to mind. The idea is that you and the other players have to work together to gather everything you need including the treasure you came for before the island you’re on sinks into the ocean.
It’s fun working together and I always thought it did a good job of incentivising that.
Ayaneo have always struggled with steam os integration, but it probably will have a Bazzite variant.
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Handheld_and_HTPC_edition/Handheld_Wiki/Ayaneo_Handhelds/
I don’t see why you’d spend $900 on this when you could get a better handheld for that money but I’ll give them this, the swappable joystick/button thing is cool.
COD - Requires Kernel Level Anti-cheat (RICHOCHET).
Paladins - Requires Kernel Level Anti-cheat (EAC).
GTA V - Requires Kernel Level Anti-cheat (BattleEYE).
Destiny 2 - Requires Kernel Level Anti-cheat (BattleEYE).
This is the fault of the developers themselves not making those games compatible with Steam OS, and has nothing to do with Steam or Linux and everything to do with the developers themselves. So, if you’re going to play the blame game, blame the correct people.
I don’t know about VR in Linux, but it looks like the other people in this thread have me covered on that and they have explained in detail what’s going on there.
I’ve been in this space since the original steam machines. You either have no idea what it was like 10+ years ago with Linux gaming, or you’re being willfully ignorant and not finding out anything about what’s going on now and you’re salty for reasons I don’t know and don’t care about. Do not at me. I don’t care what you have to say if all you’re going to do is be sardonic and caustic. You have a nice day.
Said the person who did no research and has no idea what they’re talking about. Steam OS has been pushing game devs and publishers to be more compatible with Linux, not less. Additionally, the only online games that really have problems with steam OS are ones that require kernel level anti-cheat, and we all should be pushing for the downfall of that. It isn’t necessary.
I mean. Apex Launcher does all this stuff (except I don’t know what organize app icons in bulk means in this context). If it means apply an icon pack? Then it does that.