Knee jerk reaction based on OEM feedback for a built in handheld interface for the OEM handhelds like the rog ally. Steam deck clearly caused a disruption in the market that Microsoft simply cannot stop. It’ll probably have alps joysticks that drift, they’ll slap an over powered AMD apu in it with a shit battery that it’ll chew through in an hour like every other handheld PC. Valve hit the sweet spot with the deck, and there’s no real reason to upgrade it, sure you have more powerful apu’s but battery tech hasn’t caught up yet and the only way to counteract it is slap a bigger battery on the device. At that point what’s the point of putting a power hungry apu in a handheld?
All the Solitaire devs seem to care about these days is money and enshittification. Spending time on architecture ports is the last thing I’d expect from them
Who knows what happens when someone else takes the helm at Valve, might not be too long either. Lots of companies see a massive shift in company policies once a new CEO takes over. Hopefully it’ll be someone that upholds the same integrity as Gabe.
The surface is one of my go-to examples of Microsoft’s ineptitude. The surface is honestly an amazing tablet. It works very well, great battery life, and you can either use a standard tablet mode or it as a full Windows machine. For businesses too it was a slam-dunk, where since it’s Windows it already interfaces with most IT systems out of the box, no special setup or store integrations or Apple stuff, it’d work with Microsoft AD. Unfortunately it followed the pattern.
They gave up on tablets before fully vetting the market
Apple lands the iPad, and it takes off, is groundbreaking
Microsoft got butthurt that Apple made profit on a thing they gave up on
They take years coming up with the Surface, in the meantime every 3rd party came out with an Android one that was slow and choppy so the people have all decided iPad was the winner
Microsoft hired thousands of engineers and pivoted the entire world to touch, forcing Windows 8 down everyone’s throats, making the public hate it
Surface finally lands, but everyone already hates the interface, and anyone who wants a tablet already has one
Microsoft quietly lays off everyone. Surface is still around, but on life support.
Maybe they should focus on it quicker. Surely it cannot be that difficult to build a handheld based on how quickly Steam Deck competition hit the market within, what, a year of the Steam Deck release?
(I’m lazy and did not read the article, only the headline.)
It’ll [attempt] to make Windows less of a hinderance on THEIR handheld. If all these other Windows-based devices are now rivals, why let them benefit from hard work when you can force them out?
If they released one NOW they’d probably be shooting themselves in the foot. At best they’d get mid-generational performance improvements whereas likely in the next year or two Valve is probably going to drop a true SteamDeck 2 with significant improvements. All speculation at this point, but if you’re a bean counter at Microsoft, speculation is like 90% of your job. Unless they abandon the standard console release cycle and shoot for faster iteration, they’ll want to come out absolutely swinging to compete.
Sure, but we’re talking about a handheld. Yes, performance is improving generation over generation, but in the handheld space power usage and heat dissipation are equally important. If you’ve been keeping up with recent innovations, you’ll see that generally we are making more powerful parts, but they’re getting much more power hungry for every little percent of improvement they bring in raw horsepower. So far it doesn’t look like you could even get Xbox series S performance in a handheld yet. At least not at a reasonably portable size, cost, or battery life. You could get a little better than PS4 pro performance in a handheld at present, based on what I’ve seen. Which is not a full generational leap over what’s out there.
I think they’ll be fine. They don’t need to be the most powerful. Steam Deck is weaker than Rog Ally but remains the more popular option due to a better user experience and the Switch was significantly underpowered compared to the competition but remains a popular option to other things they bring to the table.
Microsoft won’t push for an expensive handheld so anything they bring out would likely be weaker than the top end of the market. It really comes down to what other offerings they bring.
With any luck they actually want to bring true innovations to either Windows or Xbox. Getting support for gyros, accelerometers, back buttons or touchpads into Xinput would even benefit gaming on Linux since most games seem to default to that as a lowest common denominator.
I would prefer if gyros and accelerometers die off in controllers for gaming. Tilting and shaking the controller is not something I have ever enjoyed, except when the controller is a light gun for a game like Time Crisis or Silent Hill The Arcade.
I have used it. Played Metroid Prime 3, which is probably the best implementation of motion controls by far in any game.
I still would prefer using a normal controller with no motion controls. I would really prefer a trackball on a controller, but that likely won’t happen.
Aiming in MP3 is done through the IR pointer. I loved that game. It has the best FPS controls on the Wii. But it has absolutely nothing to do with gyro aiming.
With gyro aiming you do the large movements traditionally with the right joystick and only make micro adjustments with very small natural tilting of the controller. I thought I wasn’t using it until I deactivated it. It has nothing to do with picking up the controller and pointing it at the screen. It has nothing to do with making any gestures. An outside observer might not even notice that you’re using it.
They jumped the gun releasing without a campaign at launch. People were merciless in reviews about that. It’s better since that was added but still feels a bit hollow. I hope this isn’t a mistake because it has potential and seems like it’s evolving quickly.
Would be interesting to know what positions they’re firing.
I bet it’s yet again none of the project and management level staff. Since they’re talking about “saying goodbye to a number of incredibly talented and dedicated team members”, after they said “we made the difficult decision to restructure our studio to ensure our long-term sustainability”.
So you have to fire people, but you fire the “incredibly talented and dedicated” employees. All this tells me is that projects they’re working on aren’t going to improve, if they ever get wrapped up even.
They aren’t listening to their community is what. I play almost daily, and all they fucking talk about is ‘wait for 4.0, it’s going to be so much better!’ But they refuse to fix major problems, performance sucks, and the recent 3.24.2 patch may or may not have borked the game in many ways.
They need to perfect the game that already exists, fix the issues and iron out the code before working on more fucking mechanics. I swear it’s so bad. The article calls Chris a perfectionist, but that couldn’t be furtfrom the truth, he is a dreamer, that says put this amazing thing in then forgets about it and moves on to the next thing overnight. The game will go nowhere until he’s gone.
Edit: fixed a spelling error and added some basic formatting.
The interesting part is, if they say the game is complete or at least in “1.0” shape, it will suddenly mean that people will judge it as a product and not just a vision. CIG won’t call it finished as long as they possibly can.
insider-gaming.com
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