Comment on Microsoft’s New Xbox Strategy Starts with Windows and Ends with No Console
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 9 months agoValve isn’t making their next Steam Deck anytime soon because the technology doesn’t exist yet. You can crank up the wattage and put in a bigger battery, but those things make the handheld larger, heavier, and hotter, so they’re not interested. This is a bottleneck from AMD and their R&D.
But especially due to live service anti cheat and Game Pass, I agree that there’s a potential market for this strategy. There’s certainly no way they compete with Sony by doing what consoles have always done.
I own the original LCD Steam Deck. Still a fantastic device.
But after trying the newer handhelds, I have to admit: the upgrades are anything but minor. Visually, it’s a bigger leap than the jump from DS to DSi. The difference is immediately obvious.
Apple does have the technology though… imagine a steam deck with the m series chip? An m4 pro could run basically all modern games on a small screen at 60+ fps with the right software…
That’s not really how any of this works. Apples m4 are ARM CPUs. Games have to be built specifically for arm to run correctly. Most games in the PC ecosystem are built for amd64 or x86-64. If those same games were built specifically for arm then they’d probably run quite well but since most aren’t and game devs aren’t likely to go back and port an already finished and sold product to a new cpu architecture they’ll probably run worse. Apple did provide a compatibility layer for other archs to arm IIRC but that’s more overhead for the same games and I don’t know how that’ll impact performance. My point is really just it’s not a clear cut situation of “my games will run better on more efficient cpus”.
I’m imagining a lot of regression in compatibility and performance loss, as that’s what I’ve heard of the state of Apple’s new CPU architecture.
Performance-wise apple’s chips are way ahead of amd and any other arm based chip as well. Not sure what you’re talking about.
And compatibility ofc, that’s what I meant good software. Like optimizing steamOS to run on the m chips.
But that would never happen of course.
The point being that it will resume when the technology exists; it’s not that they lost interest in it.
I tried to make similar points of it just being too early in the console’s lifespan.
Hell notice valve has made it very clear they are not making another steam deck anytime soon,
FFS. I don’t care.
Okay? That wasn’t the central point of their message. It seems somewhat disrespectful to respond that way, ignoring everything else they said. They have a valid point.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 9 months ago
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 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 the drop a handheld with an Xbox interface. It’s not a good time.