this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
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Steam Deck

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Handheld consoles are the industry's next battleground | Opinion (www.gamesindustry.biz)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
37 comments fedilink hide all child comments
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Can anyone tell me where handhelds are supposed to go from here? Truly. I can't really see what can be improved from the perspective of the Steam Deck - all the things that come from a next gen device seem a bit antithetical to how the portable device functions. Better specs to make use of the better screen (HZ+resolution) mean a bigger battery and more weight, so...

The OG Deck is about as heavy as any portable should ever be, the OLED is noticeably lighter. So are the console wars shifting to handhelds in the next gen hardware packaging competition? The future of the gaming industry is just making more powerful Nintendo Switches?

Note: I'm not against more handhelds being out there. I just genuinely don't see where they can really improve from here in any meaningful way after the next screen improvement

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

as a steam deck user, who would like to use it during shortish transits (20 minutes per ride) i'd like it to be a good bit smaller. the size of the ayn odin 2 mini would be ideal, with slightly recessed sticks, so you could easily pull it out of the backpack and put it back in quickly. yes, that's conflicting with others who would like to have a bigger screen, using it more like a travel console being tied to wall power, but that's personal preference.
outside of the usual spec bumps, that's all i could think of in terms of upgrades for the deck.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

I can definitely see the benefit in smaller sized portables, but I do wonder at what point we reach diminishing returns. I can't help but think about the 3DS and PSP and how silly it would be to be trying to play Battlefield and CoD in the Steam Deck style. At the same time, I played Monster Hunter all the time on those, and MH:W on my phone with a controller and steam remote play.

So then I think about the types of games, like Disgaea and other J/RPG's and how a smaller Steam Deck would fit that well. Idk where I'm going with this, it's just interesting to think about how gaming is fractured based on the genre and form factor. I use my Steam Deck a lot to play games, but I'm playing games that I stopped playing on PC, because indie 2D side scrollers feel weird there.

Are we just going to get to the point where gamers have their 3DS/PSP sized portable, the Steam Deck sized portable, and the large tablet sized portable, each for specific games? Lol

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

This is mainly just looking at it being different consoles in the space. The Switch 2/PS handheld/Xbox handheld won't have to compete on who has the best hardware, for Nintendo games you get the switch, PS games the PSP, and game pass you get the Xbox.

As for future PC handhelds, there will be linear improvements (better performance, better battery life, etc), different UI options (SteamOS versus windows with some program slapped on top), and different use cases (smaller more portable devices, etc).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

MS and Sony can push their handhelds, but I'm not looking for a locked down device to play games on. The reason the Steam Deck was such a sell for me was that it is a full PC. That I can do what I want with. I don't want "mobile" or console gaming, because they have turned them into predatory micro-transaction mess.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Didn't, like, steam deck and the switch already do THAT? Maybe they'll force Sony to make a PSP2. I still love that little guy 😭

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The success of the Steam Deck alongside the Nintendo Switch I think is the primary reason MS is attempting to enter the market, and So y is giving it another try.

Out of curiosity, is there any reason why you don’t consider the Vita a PSP2?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Honestly, just forgot. 😅 PSP3 then lmao

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yeah, the consoles corpos might fight over who can make a more widely adopted locked down and limited handheld than Nintendo with none of the multiplayer features.

Preferably with underbuilt sticks that can't handle more than a few months of use.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Just randomly at 28min29s. That's from randomly browsi2ng the game to give it a fair shake. IT'S AMERICAS admin.de

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What? I don't follow you at all.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Me neither, I guess I left the phone unlocked in the pocket.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Yeah, handheld war, Anbernic vs Miyoo, amirite?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I think what handheld gamers really want is AI integration.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Well, good/useful AI integration. An AI that makes games infinitely replayable by changing the story, levels, and characters so they're 100% unique every time? That could be awesome. Oh man I bet that sort of thing would be amazing if done right in a roguelike game!

AI that tries to figure out how to sell you more loot boxes? No thanks!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

if done right in a roguelike game

Here, have a Dwarf Fortress: https://bay12games.com/dwarves/ (For the roguelike adventure mode, you currently need to get an older version, 0.47.5 or buy the game on Steam, as adventure mode in version 50.xx is still in beta.)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Honestly, I'm just excited for the possibility of NPCs that can have lifelike conversations. Should add a lot to RPGs.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Ever since I was a kid after seeing BMO in adventure time I've been obsessed with this idea.

A console with an AI that will make new games to play when it's plugged in and not in use. Then you can favorite the ones that are fun and it will scrap the rest and make more games. One day I hope

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

And they've already lost lmao

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Right? The only ones who can muscle in on the deck are Microsoft and Sony, and that's only because they have their fan base and users who purchased their games digitally from their stores. Even then, they're way behind on the Deck.

PC gamers Deck won hands down. I'm happy to see competition, but the Deck won. Everything else right now are the android Honeycomb tablets following the iPad. I'm sure they work fine, but there's already a winner.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Ive been a console gamer for twenty years and I bought Decks for myself and my wife. For me, console gaming was about convinence and comfortability (and group play). The deck nails both of those, with the addition of cheaper games and full PC capability, while consoles have been regressing on convinence. The Deck also has an easy path toward the big screen group play I enjoy with accessories

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (5 children)

People are 100% ignoring that going mobile is a red herring for the fact graphical fidelity is becoming increasingly expensive and publishers need an excuse to divest from lifelike game worlds and graphics. It's the perfect excuse to go back to stylized games like SOTC or HiFiRush without antagonising the CoD and FiFA type crowds that send death threats when the recoil changes left 0,01mm in the latest update, or when there's women as protagonists.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Honestly good. Graphics now have honestly gotten so bad with efficiency. We have hardware 10x more powerful and games that run 20x worse and have artifacting from forced TAA. Not every game but a lot are looking less clear, more blurry, with way better textures and resolution but just simply run like absolute shit. And for what? best example I can think of off the top of my head is csgo to CS2. Looks a little better yeah, but going from being able to be played on a core 2 duo integrated graphics to barely running for me when I had 16GB of ram and an rx 5500 that's crazy. It doesn't look that much better to run that much worse

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The game Bodycam was developed by 2 people, a 17 and 20 year old, and has the most realistic graphics I've ever seen.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Then you haven't seen jack shit...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

TIL we call content farms "reviewers" nowadays.

Just from the top of my head Arma III realism mod looks like, if not better than, this. On the bright side, bodycam just pulled a fast one on their monetisation so they should thank you for directing idiots to their game, so someone is getting a good holiday season.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Hey that's great that Arma III mods also are realistic! Love to see it. Star Wars Battlefront mods also came close to photorealistic at moments. I'm sure these community made-by-volunteers-in-their-free-time mods were SO expensive to develop that it spurred a handheld gaming conspiracy, right???

Those dastardly indie teenager devs!!! 🤪

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yes, because photorealism LUTs and reshades are equivalent to the implementation of things like subsurface scattering, modelling characters and worlds, etc. Yep, you really got me there, clearly the money being used to develop games is stupid because some dudes made a baclava using unreal 5. *slow clap

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Okie dokie then!

continues enjoying the Steam Deck

🙂

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Have a nice life.

*typed on Firefox running on my deck

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Graphical fidelity isn't becoming more expensive, games (generally AA and AAA that target 'realistic' graphics) are just increasingly botch jobs. Games look worse than they did 10 years ago, on hardware that is like 5x more powerful.

What has this got to do with handhelds though? Handhelds will require studios to actually make their games properly again (I hope).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

"Games look worse than they did 10 years ago, on hardware that is like 5x more powerful."

This, as a generalisation, is not true. A critical example is Demon's Souls (2009 vs 2020) which was quite the transformation. Nevertheless, I do agree that games have been increasingly becoming more demanding of hardware for very little pay off in terms of visual quality. One can thank NVIDIA for that. At any rate, due to said visual fidelity and graphical demands, AAA games are now hitting 9 figures in development costs which is problematic. Furthermore, the gameplay loops have seen very little evolution in the AAA space whereas companies keep dumping wads of cash on dubious graphical technology like path tracing (which we've seen before, those of us who were here for Giants and Larrabee). Pathtracing brings nothing to the table in terms of gameplay and is basically a tech demo to convince people to buy overpriced hardware (in terms of efficiency). Handheld on the other hand has driven people to games like balatro, vampire survivors, valheim, etc, that have very little in terms of graphical fidelity but have well crafted gameplay loops. I think that's the market Sony is eying.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It is more and more true as each developer looking for them shiny games switch to UE5 and dont bother replacing its shitty ghosting and blurry TAA and ML upscaling crap.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

UE5 is amazing but publishers think you give middleware to a dev team and they can make a baller game like if it were a powerpoint presentation. They have laid off a significant portion of the accumulated know how to save some pennies (and because some people took advantage of some movements to take vengeance upon people like Avelone) and now they are staffed by people who are very inexperienced and frankly, untalented. To further the problems, one of the dirty secrets of the industry was to offload large swathes of the work to code monkeys from low income regions, again, to save cash. Now we're at a point where most of the talent that survived the great purge is either captive at large publishers or working with indies. We severely lack AA games that were always scratching a very specific population's itch (except for 4x and grand strategy, boys be eating well).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This article is literally the opposite of ignoring that, is it not?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

It's speculating on the reasons, which especially for Sony, are a red herring.