Steam Deck

If I'm playing modern games on a TV? PS5 easy. But still the pro over the deck.

I love my deck. As the handheld it's intended to be. It's not powerful enough for an acceptable experience running a AAA 3D game on a TV screen. You can ignore the resolution and artifacts and just generally low visual quality and poor frame rate on a small screen, because playing the games portably at all is a huge step up. You can't ignore any part of it on a TV. It's fine for indie games, older games, 2D stuff, etc.

But it doesn't have the performance for a good living room experience if you're looking to play modern AAA games. (Ignoring all their bullshit rootkits on PC that block a lot of multiplayer games out completely, which are the games you have to pay for on PS. You just can't play most of them on Linux at all.)

Now that the Steam Deck and linux gaming has found some success I really hope Valve or someone else revisits the home console market with a similar approach.

You couldn't really build a PC for the same price as a PS5 with the same performance unless you're buying used parts in most places but that's not because Sony is selling consoles at a loss right now like the olden days. A large system integrator like Valve (or xbox if they want to change their formula) could offer similar perf/price without all the downsides of these locked down consoles.

Since buying a steam deck I've spent more money on games I can play on it than I would normally for the pc.

That's still cheaper than buying a ps5 on its own without the extra cost of games.

PS5 Pro - only marginally better than an option that's only $450.

Steam Deck OLED - only marginally better than an option that's only $300.

The difference is that Steam Deck is actually cheap compared to what the competition does. It's also the first generation of Steam Deck and the upgrade with an OLED (and lot of other stuff too) is actually substantial. And there are multiple versions of the Deck available to choose less drive space. Imagine this was an option on PS5 Professional too. Contrary, the PS5 Professional is the most expensive console compared to its competition. It's so expensive, that it set a new bar.

That's the opposite of what Steam Deck does. Steam Deck is the only current generation game console that gets cheaper over time. Also one is a handheld format, which is hard to make cheap, especially because its compatible to PC hardware (and software).

If you think $700 is bad, it's £700 in the UK... which is $913. 🤢

Also:

• median household income, UK (2022): £32,400 ($42,265)

• median household income, USA (2022): $74,580

A PS5 Pro is 26% of the typical UK household monthly income.

A PS5 Pro is 11% of the typical US household monthly income.

The US pricing is bad. The UK pricing is absolutely insane.

The OLED Deck starts at £479. Still a lot but not as egregious. The LCD Deck is currently £262 ($344), which is pretty great.

I'm not sure if it's the meme but here (Europe) there is a huge difference in price between the basic 512GB OLED SD and the basic PS5 pro option.

569€ vs 800€.

Yeah, but can any of those play the saves I already have on my computer??

*squints* Sir, that is an LCD model you have there.

Not to mention that you can buy the previous version for 300 € and get most of the same value (less storage, gpu, screen, battery)