Call me dumb if you want, but I still see a big issue in MSFT's naming convention for XBox. They need to stop trying to be clever and just do something sequential.
I agree with you about the brand loyalty. But the fact remains, they put out a console in 2020 that in some ways was actually weaker in power than the console they put out in 2017. Great for customers since it’s so cheap, but not great for developers when other modern systems are so much more powerful. Larian can’t even put out Baldur’s Gate 3 on XSS because it can’t handle split screen for that game, which means no XSX version either.
As for games… Everyone’s different but as a big fan of the Xbox during the 360 era, the Xbox Series have no (exclusive) games that have appealed to me personally. And the ones that I am excited about (Fable, State of Decay 3, Everwild) have no release dates and are almost certainly years away.
Yeah. I stopped buying XBox after they let my account get hacked and restored none of my purchased content.
I occasionally consider giving Xbox another try, but then the whole tiers of systems and naming nonsense takes long enough to parse that I remember why I stopped buying Xboxes.
As a current Switch owner deciding what to pick up next time I spring for a new system, the lack of anything portable from Microsoft and Sony is kinda wild to me.
It’s got some ground to make up if it’s going to try to take on the ROG Ally. Still, competition is exactly what this space needs ATM - can’t wait to see where the market is in a few years!
These devices are honestly quite fast, the overhead is similar to the overhead on an entry level gaming PC (to be fair, that is still a substantial overhead, but people accept it)
I second this. I’m planning to start switching my devices from Windows to Linux in a couple of weeks due to good experience I’ve had with the Steam Deck
They don’t; there was an internal tech demo that never went anywhere but was spread around online a few months ago with a bunch of misinformation that Microsoft was preparing to fight the Steam Deck head on.
If this form factor is here to stay, and hopefully it is, Microsoft will probably adapt Windows to it (also hopefully). SteamOS is very good though, can manufacturers not just use that?
As long as you don’t use it for Office, Microsoft isn’t going to spend money on it. Their cash cow is M365 and Azure, they don’t even care when every single gamer pirates their OS.
Eh, this and the Ally are cash grabs, I doubt they intend to spend the money needed to support custom software long-term. They’ll just hope that Windows updates don’t mess it up and if they do, they’ll blame Microsoft.
Asus and Lenovo clearly put no thought into how controlling windows desktop with a controller feels worse than pancaking your own testicles. The steam deck trackpads are far from an amazing experience for desktop input but it is at least usable and not the worst thing ever.
Man, everyones jumping in onto the handheld gaming PC segment. Pretty cool. Hopefully it will light a fire under Nintendo’s butt to do better with its hardware.
Yet the sales figures show Nintendo have amazing sales.
PS2 - 159 million.
Nintendo DS - 154.02 million.
Nintendo switch - 125.62 million
Gameboy/ Gameboy colour - 118.69 million
PS4 - 117.2 million.
3 out of the 5 top sales belong to Nintendo. So regardless of hardware, Nintendo is a loved gaming system.
Whereas Xbox is number 9 on that list with the 360 at 85 million. So the console war seems to be between Nintendo and Sony at this point.
I think Nintendo knows it’s market pretty well. I have both a switch and a steam deck andO have a lot of the same games on each. The deck is obviously the higher power unit. I got it just a short time ago to try to play through my backlog, although to be honest I’ve logged more hours on new purchases like Stray and Dredge. It’s a good system.
The switch outshines it in a couple of places, though. First, they got the form factor - specifically the size and weight - better than steam did. It’s smaller and lighter, and I think the battery lasts longer. More importantly, the games that run on the switch were made for it. There’s no squinting at tiny fonts or trying to figure whether and how to use the trackpad to control the mouse bits. If it’s on the switch, I can be pretty sure it is playable on the switch. I’m still getting used to the issues with scaling down the desktop experience to a deck, but already I’m thinking I won’t be playing a lot of cyberpunk without booking up a mouse, keyboard, and monitor.
In short, the deck and windows handhelds need to perform at the level of a (low end) desktop (because they’re playing desktop games) as well as worry about scaling and transforming the UI. The switch doesn’t have that problem, and the trade off is a more limited (but still extensive) library.
The switch is my first Nintendo device since the NES, and the first party content isn’t what made me finally try it. I like playing games like Diablo on it. I think Nintendo, by owning the entire stack, can serve up a better and more curated experience. If I didn’t have a library of a couple hundred steam games that I’ve never played, I’d probably not have considered getting the deck. I am enjoying it, and some games are phenomenal, but from a performance-that-actually-impacts-the-user perspective, Nintendo might just come out on top.
As happy as I am with my steam deck I love to see competition. I love portables all the way back from my game boy, game gear, all the way through to the vita.
I hope this new wave of high powered portables keep pushing each other to their limits so we see the best in our hands.
All these new handhelds with windows seem to have completely forgot how much of a failure windows has been on mobiles in the past (other than laptops and such). I know windows mobile was a whole different ui but isn’t windows 10/11 even worse to use on small screens like this?
I really hope valve starts supporting steamOS for devices other than the deck soon so we can have the full deck experience including all the tweakable settings.
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