I feel like that's cherry picking, like I'm comparing the cheapest Dutch webshop price for a new PS5 and it's € 549,99 vs the Steam Deck which is only purchasable through Valve's store for... € 419?
I haven't even picked the LCD 128GB SD...just didn't pick the option with max storage. Also haven't picked the PS5P with the Disc reader..
But anyway. This meme is very specific (and pointless) and it is just targeting a minority who would be choosing between a high end console to play at the sofa on the big screen and a handheld to play anywhere.
I think the main SD group of people, is people who want a handheld, and that group of people generally choose between SD, Nintendo Switch, or other handhelds (like the Asus ROG etc).
Some would go with Nintendo because they just care about Nintendo games. But the majority is just looking for a handheld to play any good games anywhere.
To answer the last question. I have a PC, a PS5 and a SD. So some people who own a SD would buy a PS5. If I'm on my couch I use the PS5.
If I'm at the terrace, or on a flight, etc. I use the SD.
If you think 26% is bad, in Russia it's going to be priced at around ₽80-100k(~$883, VAT included), but the median monthly salary is ₽43.500 - $480... That's well over 100% median household income given that over 38% families only have a single parent. And I'm pretty sure that's not even the worst out there, think like Argentina has an extortionate import tax or something?
It really makes the point to me that the PS1 and PS2, when adjusted for inflation, and for relative compute power, were just such a fantastic deal.
I was recovering from some serious console-purchase fatigue, when I bought my PS1 to replace my garage sale purchased Super NES. It was a big deal to me.
I've paid PS5 prices (inflation adjusted) for a game system a few times (my first Switch and SteamDeck), but they've been a lot more mind blowing than what appears to be on offer today.
Charts like that are great, I love to see them. However, they need to have a year for the inflation-adjusted dollars else it’s nearly meaningless when referred back to.
And for those who have not tried it, the desktop is fully functional (not some half baked version. My son uses the desktop mode as a full school workstation for internet browsing, email, teams, Google docs, etc
I had to use mine as a desktop for two weeks while my PC was undergoing a repair. It was wholly uneventful: installed OpenOffice and had a wholly normal workweek. It’s perfectly fine to use as a regular, boring desktop if you need it to. Absolutely love the Steamdeck. Every gamer should have one.
I used mine for a few months for work. only problem i had with it was it struggled with multiple external monitors. i got it working but i had to fiddle with xrandr everytime i docked it and put it into desktop mode
This was a couple years ago now though, it might be better now.
And even then it's no guarantee. Plenty of games needed support from the likes of GoG to run. Hell, I couldn't even play Ex Machina because I had a HDR monitor and the game detected that and completely broke. Disabling HDR in Windows did nothing.
After over 3 decades as a gamer and tech user this is maybe the single most consistent important benefit for any open platform were you can just install Linux.
The rest is nice but this one means that 10 or 20 years from now your hardware might have been repurposed for something else and still be useful and in use whilst a closed platform will just be more junk in a junkyard or sitting in a box of those things you've kept just because you don't like to throw expensive stuff away but will in practice never use again.
While valve has a lot of deserved goodwill, that's always the problem - they're well-behaved, but set up in a way in which the customer has no leverage if they where to change their approach tommorow.
Good thing drm-free games run just as well on the steam deck.
These devices have different use cases. Steam Deck also is digital only. If a publisher decides to kill a game, they can control whether you can or can't play the game. PS5 Pro is expensive, but so are video cards nowadays. PS5 Pro is just following a trend set years before, including the shift from physical games and cost. The only way to stop anti-consumer trends is to stop buying expensive hardware (PS5 Pro included). Also, give some love to physical copies of games.
Saying the Steam Deck is digital only is like saying a tower computer is digital only. That's purely false. If you can put it on a tower computer, you can put it on the Steam Deck.
All the Steam Deck, like many modern tower computers, needs for physical copies is a USB media reader.
A game that was released last year has absolutely zero knowledge of this 8k PS5 so it's not going to magically render at 8k or 40% improvement. Some might get a framerate bump if frame sync can be turned off - the game might have been GPU bound and therefore with a better GPU it yields a better framerate. Sometimes. And AI upscaling might give a pseudo > 4k effect but it's not really true 8k.
A handful of games might get patched to avail of the improved rendering capabilities when they detect PS5 Pro. Minimal stuff really. Maybe the config file will improve draw distance or turn on certain effects like raytraced shadows / reflections when it knows the console can handle it.
Hardly seems worth the vast additional expense especially if somebody already owns a PS5 though. Moreso because Sony are trying to stiff people into buying the cheaper "digital" version which basically means any physical collection won't work with it.
The PlayStation store is also a miserable shopping experience. If you don't know what game you want or just want to browse, good fucking luck finding it there. No screenshots, no gameplay, no user reviews, no related games to compare to, no info about if your friends are wishlisting or playing it. Just a choice of buying the expensive version or the more expensive version, and good luck figuring out which DLC is already included in the deluxe editions.
I honestly realy dont mind lack of info but the loading time is horrendus if you want to browse current sales or just check the game info . And while my internet is not that great there is a day and night diffrence between steam and Psstore.
You used to be able to pick up games a year after they came out for like £5 on a flash deal. These days stuff is still full retail price years after launch just so it looks better during the few sales a year. We need to get back to the days of cut price re-releases (Playstation Platinum).
I got a shitload of games from bundles though. That at least is cheap on PC, along with Epic delving into their Fortnite war chest to bribe us with actually free games.
Think the best way to game cheaply on consoles is to pick up physical discs second hand (although a lot of games don't even launch on disc any more), and be on the higher tiers of PS Plus for all the games. There's some really good stuff on there, more than enough to keep me busy.
Subscription for Internet access is the one that's always baffled me. What a stupid business model. I guess devices not belonging to their buyers is not a new thing.
That's kinda misinformation (or at least how you word it.)
Of course you can go online without a subscription, like MMOs or F2P games, but yeah generally need it for online play, which includes other benefits.
Consoles still have physical media, while the majority of PC games are licensed to you, basically renting if you want to talk about belongings / ownership.
Luckily we have GOG and even pirated games for games preservation, however it can be very limited at times.
In desktop mode you can change the resolution of the connected display. It goes back to 720p if you go back to gaming mode, but you can always just launch games from the desktop if you want higher resolution for a specific game.
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.)
Yup. As someone who hasn't had a dedicated gaming PC in about a decade, I've been really happy with the PS5 + Steam Deck combo (well, plus Switch, but that thing collects dust until Nintendo releases a Mario platformer).
I recently got a laptop that's not made for gaming specifically, but can handle them pretty well (with Proton), and that has scratched any itch I've had for PC games that don't lend themselves to Deck or console (your RTS games and such).
At risk of giving away the game... I think people would be very surprised to see how cheap physical copies of PS4 and PS5 games go for when you catch them on sale.
I love my Steam deck, and bounce between how heavily I use it vs the switch* or PS5 depending on the games I'm into at the moment. But misrepresenting its utility as a modern living room PC (like the OP) doesn't help anyone and is just going to leave people disappointed.
The PS5 is probably my smallest library (and mostly PS4 games, a lot of which were before I had a PC), but it's definitely plenty capable and I don't regret the purchase at all. (The controller is also the coolest non graphics addition to gaming I've experienced in a long time).
*The switch desperately needs a 3rd party replacement for the controllers, though, because the joycons are bad brand new.
No joke, I'm tempted to buy a Steam Deck (or true Linux phone) because... It can run a local HTML/CSS/JS app on a browser with filesystem access and audio support. This is the power of having an OS that is not locked down.
Speaking of which, what would you recommend for me to run a local HTML/CSS/JS app on a browser with filesystem access and audio support? (No, Android is too locked down to meet that spec) Other required specs:
Portable: Can fit in a pocket
16GB or more usable storage
Bluetooth support
Ideally low-cost
Edit: I figured out a way to do it on my phone! I used the "Simple HTTP server" app to self host the HTML/CSS/JS into http://127.0.0.1:8080/.
I have an Orange PI Pro 5 16GB on a box that smoothly runs a full blown Ubuntu Desktop version and would fit in a pocket though it's maybe a little too thick (from memory the box it's about 3x5x2 cm).
Total cost was about $170.
The board itself would fit a thinner box, but you might have to 3D print one.
Mind you, a N100 Mini-PC that costs the same is even more capable as a Linux Desktop, but it's significantly larger and will definitely not fit a pocket.
You can find cheaper SBCs capable of running a Desktop Ubuntu but in my experience (with a $35 Banana Pi P2-Zero) if you go too far down the price scale Desktop Linux performance stops being smooth, even if the board is a tiny thing.
It was actually quite surprising for me recently when I found out some of these things are perfectly capable Linux Desktops.
You can probably encase a Raspberry PI with a battery and a touch screen, micro SD cards can go much higher than 16, and install Linux. Keep in mind that the Linux touch UIs aren't really great imo, the best experience I've had so far is the steam deck.
The most expensive Steam Deck is still cheaper in my country. €680. While the PS5 Pro is €800.
And many will just buy the cheaper version and replace the SSD by themselves. The 512GB OLED version plus a 2TB drive is only €50 more expensive than the 1TB version. So even with like for like storage it’s still cheaper than the PS5P
If the PS5 wasn't my first PlayStation ever, I'd probably be pretty disappointed with it. Kinda wish I held off and waited for this one, since I'd rather have it, but financing this just doesn't make sense in my current position. Would rather build a PC and use my Deck for remote play.
This is an aggressively mid generation, I have to admit.
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.
Honestly I think the trick for valve there would just be to release a build of steam OS people can install themselves into desktops (if they don't already) and just have folks building their own machine for TV pc use.
Yeah. If Valve releases a remotely viable desktop console OS, I'll immediately build one for my living room. If for no other reason, to keep the rest of the family away from my SteamDeck.
That's always been their plan, but it's getting hit with Valve Time. My guess is that they won't do it until all issues the major with NVIDIA GPUs have been fixed, as a public build that doesn't run properly on a majority of machines wouldn't go well. The latest driver is pretty good, but the Big Picture mode is still pretty much unusable.
At the very least they're currently trying to bring official support over to other handhelds, as they've already confirmed that they want to official support for the ROG Ally and pushed out a update to SteamOS for the controller support.
It won't have the same performance as a PS5, but the new Minisforum MS-A1 with a user-upgradable CPU is a really interesting proposition. The Ryzen 8700G is pretty good, but I would expect solid upgrades to be available in the next few CPU generations.
I currently have an Nvidia Shield Pro (2019), and it's fine. I have Moonlight installed and can stream from my desktop PC using Sunshine (I do this on my Steam Deck, too), but I don't expect that Nvidia will make a replacement, and I don't know if I would get it if they did.
The software outside of Steam's big picture mode isn't ready for a full Linux couch experience, but it's close. The two projects to watch are KDE Plasma Bigscreen and Waydroid (some people are starting to get Android TV working) which would be a nice bridge to use apps designed for a TV UI until native Linux versions become available.
The Steam Deck is a slightly funny shaped x86_64 laptop. It has an AMD APU in it. You can hook it up to a monitor, mouse and keyboard and do your taxes on it if you want.
Even if it's priced too highly, the PS5 Pro will probably sell pretty well. The Playstation Portal is very overpriced for what it is, and yet it's sold very well. There's a lot of Playstation fans with money to burn apparently.
The whole reason I bought my Steamdeck was because I couldn’t get the Portal (thanks to scalpers).
Now I hardly ever turn the PS5 on because I am playing tons of games on Steam instead. When I do I am usually running something over my LAN via Chiaki to my Deck so others in my house can watch TV.
Honestly I think it's a stage of life thing. As I got older, got married, and had kids I found it increasingly hard to find time to play on my PC. The steam deck is perfect for short sessions you can stop and resume anytime, and I don't have to fight the kids for the TV or abandon everyone to sequester myself in the office.
My thing is if Sony wants me to pay computer prices, it better act like a computer. If it doesn't and the trend continues with PS6 then that's the end of me buying PlayStations.
Can you actually use steamdeck as a desktop PC though? Can it drive dual external monitors? Is it a reasonable "minipc" type thing? How much power does it munch on in idle?
Can I maybe put some other linux distro on it? So many questions
I have a Steam deck, here's the answers to my knowledge:
Yes, you can connect a keyboard and mouse, and even in SteamOS they let you access KDE in a separate "Desktop mode"
Not sure about multiple monitors but you can connect at least one. There are docks made for it to do just that (the USB C cable has display port support I think)
It runs a 4 core/8 thread AMD laptop chip so assuming you get a mouse/keyboard it should work pretty well.
It has a 5W mode in the power settings in SteamOS so I'm assuming around that much at idle.
You can put other distros on it, it's completely unlocked. You could even put Windows on it if you wanted. I'm not sure how easy the install process is though since I've just left SteamOS on mine.
Most usb-c ports with DP alt mode support up to 1 monitor at 4k@60Hz, or 2×1080p@60Hz, and I believe 2×1440p@30Hz. It comes down to bandwidth, so I think that as long as you're fine with one monitor running at a slower refresh-rate or lower resolution, you can have your primary screen displaying in high-res.
Of course, you have to also take into consideration the GPU performance, running higher resolutions will usually degrade performance!
Can you actually use steamdeck as a desktop PC though?
Depends on how many pixels you "need". Running high resolution monitors, even for basic stuff can get costly performance wise pretty damn quick, but in my opinion that isn't really asking the same question as whether the Steam Deck can be a good desktop.
You can absolutely use the Steam Deck as a desktop, I frequently use my Steam Deck in desktop mode... using the onboard controls. The only real limitation of the Steam Deck so long as you don't expect it to be a top of the line gaming pc, is that most people who buy it are never truly going to be able to give anything else other than a mouse and keyboard an honest go, they are too impatient and won't believe it can work but the sky is the limit for joystick+gyro input (our touchpad + gyro) for computers/gaming.
I'm legitimately worried about next gen, since Sony is doing the same thing with their pricing as GPU manufacturers.
That thing being, the increase in price is >/= the actual increase in performance. The PS5 Pro is a 75% price increase over the similarly disc-driveless $399 PS5 (hardware which is almost a half-decade old now).
The PS5 Pro pricing is testing the waters for PS6 pricing. If they can't sell well, they can easily drop prices (the PS5 Pro barely costs more than the PS5 to produce). They're just gathering data on what people will accept.
Doing that with the PS6 is too risky. Sony botched the launch of the PS3 and it backfired on them hard letting MS get a foothold with the 360. MS then did the same with the XBone launch and the PS4 ran away with it.
If people signal to Sony now that the PS5 Pro is way too much (it's £700/$913 here ffs), then the PS6 will be cheaper. Don't accept their greed.
I mean, a pound don't buy what it used to. We've had rampant inflation, and it's going to be hard to keep any next gen console in a price point that we think of as suitable. I mean, this is the first gen where the price has gone up during it. PS2 slim went down to under £100 by the end. I paid about £80 for a GameCube late in the gen. I remember Xbox having to give money back to people because they launched at about 300 and Sony immediately went down to £199. It was carnage.
£299 felt like a standard price point for ages. My Amiga 1200 cost about that in the early 90s, and I paid the same for a PS2 nearly 10 years later, and the Xbox 360 was about the same.
£700 feels like a piss take though, and the sales figures will surely reflect that. PS6 has got to be under £600 I reckon, and we're probably about 5 years away from that.
I dont know abut ram but its very unlikely that CPU will be a bottelneck in most games . Its not a high end pc targeting 120 frames per second where cpu matters more.
There of course will be exceptions ( space marine 2 apparently might have lower framerates on ps5 due to cpu so its unlikely that ps5 pro will fix this but who knows ).
Yeah I’d love a modern stream machine kinda Deck plugged into a TV.
For now PlayStation is nicer for TV where I can get better performance from the couch with quick resume and all. If I could get a static Deck without portable power consumption limits and decent output on a 4K display that would be ideal. But right now the Deck works docked but when blown up to TV size so many games are a low rez mess. If we could get a proper SteamOS that I could install into a media center PC I’d make it myself. All I’d hope for then is a second gen Steam Controller.
For my use, I would still want the battery/portability. Just without an internal display because I use a 1080p HMD and like playing on the Deck in bed, etc. Add a capability like the joycons but symmetrical and with all of the Deck's inputs, and I'd be quite happy.
Only issue you'll probably have is if the cloud saves are for a different OS, so if you're playing on Windows make sure it's the Proton version of the game that's installed on the Deck, if you're playing a native Linux version of the game on your PC then make sure it's the native Linux version that's installed on the Deck (usual defaults to the Proton version).
It's just an issue with the cloud save feature being too dumb, the path to the save folder isn't the same on both platforms so it doesn't sync well (although I think it does on some games).
It is rare to see a game get this wrong, the last one I saw was a Borderlands. If you look at a game's Steamdb cloud listing, they list Windows's save location, and then Mac/Linux saves are expressed as a rewrite rule.
Cloud saves on PS are handled quite simply - if you didn't pay for your very own PS Plus then go fuck yourself. I have lost dozens of Aloy hours on my brother's PS4.
While this is technically correct, it still doesn't matter. I have built my own high end PCs in the past and it is a huge waste. I'm not even sold on the steam deck yet - I do all my non- critical stuff like lemmy on this 10 year old shit tablet running Android 7
And the once PlayStation exclusive games have also been made available to Steam, thereby making them also accessible to Steam Deck. So the latter is infinitely a better choice!
You can still install whatever OS you want on it, unlike a PS5. It would be nice if you could get into desktop mode without signing in once, but that's not the end of the world. You need a Steam account to even buy it in the first place, and they're not tracking you nearly as much as say Microsoft.