I would argue that the Steam Deck's emulation capabilities surpass the Xbox. It might not play the latest games at amazing quality and performance, but it covers a wide breadth of games, far wider than what Xbox supports.
Compete in terms of value, not price. The series S gets you Xbox’s current gen game library and a selection of 360 games, and if you’re willing to use dev mode a powerful emulation suite. Deck gets a huge percentage of Steam’s 20-year catalog as one-click installs, most other PC games that don’t use anticheat as slightly more involved installs, every PC game if you want to install windows, and also a powerful emulation suite. Plus it’s a dockable handheld instead of something that needs a monitor and controller.
The series S has better media apps and can be woken up from the couch, though.
the steam deck is also just a regular ol’ PC so you can use it for non-gaming stuff like making a lil’ drawing on the go, or plug in some peripherals and just… use it like an honestly pretty okay performance desktop.
I mean, I would rather have a Steam Deck too, but then we're getting into how much people value openness versus price, and that's definitely not a constant; some people aren't going to care much about openness.
That said, if I were trying to compare Valve's offering and Microsoft's offering, I'd probably compare a desktop PC running Steam to the XBox, as they're more-physically-comparable in terms of what they can do; the Series S doesn't have one having to pay for mobility. If one were comparing to a mobile console, then sure, the Deck is a legit comparison.
I still would say that the XBox Series S is going to be cheaper on the low end, though, than a desktop PC. You can get a $279 PC that can play games and a comparable controller, but I'd bet that it'd be more-limited than a Series S.
That being said, Microsoft sells the XBox at a loss, and then makes it back by jacking up the price of games:
As VGC points out, Wright was also asked if there's ever been a profit generated from an Xbox console sale, which she confirmed has never happened. To put that in context, Microsoft has been selling Xbox consoles for nearly 20 years now, including the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and now the Xbox Series X and Series S. In all that time, every single console sale cost Microsoft money.
The reason game consoles end up being profitable is through a combination of software, service, and accessory sales, but it's still surprising to find Microsoft has never achieved hardware profitability. Analyst Daniel Ahmad confirmed that the PS4 eventually became profitable for Sony and that Nintendo developed the Switch to be profitable quickly, so Microsoft is the odd one out.
We know that consumers weight the up-front price of hardware disproportionately -- that's why you have companies selling cell phones at a loss, locking them to their network, and then making the money back in increased subscription fees. I assume that that's to try to take advantage of that phenomenon.
If you wanted to compare the full price that you pay over the lifetime of the console, one would probably need to account for the increased game price on consoles and how many games someone would buy.
Now, all that being said, I don't have a Series S or a Series X, and I'm not arguing that someone should buy them. I have a Linux PC for gaming precisely because I do value openness, so in terms of which system I'd rather have, you're preaching to the choir. I'm just saying that I don't think that I'd agree with the above statement that the Deck is as cheap as the Series S.
With the best will in the world, given the dire performance of Borderlands 4 even on much more powerful hardware, the notion that it was ever going to work on the Switch 2… how should we phrase this… was never realistic.
Randy seems more interested in running his mouth than getting anything done about the game’s performance issues on any platform, so this decision is hardly unsurprising at this juncture. The fact that they were able to pull the plug this close to the alleged release date also points to the fact that this was to be yet another one of those game-not-actually-on-the-cartridge deals, if they were even planning to make cartridges for it at all, so that would have been yet another nonstarter for many potential buyers. This whole thing was dead on arrival. The only difference is, now we know it’s official.
Borderlands as a whole doesn’t have a great track record on portable platforms anyway. The OG Switch version also had less than stellar performance, and the best that can be said about the PS Vita version of BL2 is that even with all the cuts and downgrades its frame rate is probably better measured in seconds-per-frame rather than frames-per-second. (I have direct experience with that one, being one of the six people on Earth dumb enough to actually own the Vita version of Borderlands 2. But in my defense, it was literally cheaper to buy the BL2+Vita bundle than to buy a Vita on its own. That’s right: It’s so bad, the Vita release had a negative retail value.)
Randy and leadership thought that fans would just not complain about the performance and just deal with it… and when they didn’t just sit back and take it… They definitely knew they wouldn’t accept switch 2 current performance…God I’d hate to see what kinda performance that got
It’s definitely much more polished than the first installment. I’ve played for around 40 hours so far and can probably count the bugs I’ve encountered so far on one hand.
Is it the same combat system as the first? No matter how hard I tried, it just wouldn’t click for me. Ended up modding myself invincible in order to beat the game…
I’ll do it again too if I need to because I love everything else about the game, but I’d prefer not to
It gets too easy too fast IMO. I haven’t done much of the main quest yet but I’m already a invincible human tank and killing armored enemies with single hits. I might swap my sword with a lower tier weapon to get a bit of the challenge back.
I remember the game director saying he doesnt want to make the same game twice (when they made eternal focus on using the right weapons and not just shotgun everythign) so this likely a new spin on doom formula again
I know all the best words, okay, people are saying that I know the most beautiful words, okay, no one knows more about words than I do, big beautiful words, the WORDIST even.
Yep. There would be a line of lawyers at that guys door the next day to ruin his entire life. I'm surprised they haven't already. Would love to play it but unless there is a "leak" it's not happening.
Coffee Stain managed to get UE5 to keep window settings between sessions, but what do they know? Certainly not how to not fix an inventory screen bug that’s been in 4 games at this point.
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