Fair enough. I can’t even buy a Steam Deck in Australia so I’m pretty happy the ROG Ally exists and is what it is. Maybe we get the Steam Deck 2 done day, I would be keen to check it out.

Yep it’s shifty. And it doesnt need to be: I watched LTT’s response video and they explained the sequence of events in more details. The first response tried to spin it which was an own goal.

Not really. A screen of that size is really forgiving. I’m not sure if you have seen the Ally in person? In a lot of games you can turn some GPU intensive settings down or upscaling on and it’s not nearly as noticeable. The sharpness really stands out though.

Anyway, you seem pretty thrilled with the Steam Deck, which is great. I’m just pointing out that there are some pretty sweet perks with the Ally (there’s plenty of downsides too). All the best!

while we haven’t sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype)

^ I took that at face value. If true that they didn’t do this until after GN video then this was very unethical. This is pissing in our pockets.

1080p is a more flexible choice though. You can always just set it to 720p for better performance. Or upscale to 1080p or drop the internal render resolution so the UI remains 1080 while the game itself renders 720. You gain many options and lose none (other than just battery).

I would have loved to see something like that on the Ally. It’s very situational, but I can imagine in those situations it feels great (I own a Steam Controller, so I’ve used something very similar).

I think if you had a chance to see the Ally screen in person you might have a similar feeling. It changes the experience a lot.

For example, Diablo 4 with upscaling and the right settings is a 1080p experience, so text is crisp and UI elements are clear. At those settings in 15w I get mostly 60fps in dungeons, when things get hectic and the frames drop to 45 or 50 the VRR makes it hard to notice. Fan noise and heat aren’t really notable either, I just wish there was a little more battery to round that all out.

Handheld Companion are doing good work implementing better controller options (including gyro) and power management (including autoTDP) and I believe will have napping to the OEM keys sorted out eventually. If that sort of stuff could go into a distro I could see Arch or ChimeraOS being really interesting options. Hopefully the ROG Ally sells well and there’s a community to support it in this way, it could be great!

Both are great options! Just to counterbalance arguments against:

I can’t buy a Steam Deck in Australia, but I can buy the ROG Ally.

Windows can be clunky, but that less-than-stellar experience is limited to navigating and launching games. The stock launcher works fine, it’s just bare-bones. You can set Steam to launch into big picture on boot at which point it’s the same experience as the Steam Deck anyway.

All games install and run, there’s absolutely no dicking around required compared to some experiences on Steam Deck.

Touch controls are nice. 120hz VRR 1080p screen is a better draw imo as it’s universally applicable to all games. That screen makes sub-60fps experiences much nicer and has better colours and contrast and uniformity (not to mention resolution).

ROG Ally cooling system is really great, and really quiet. I don’t feel like there’s a desktop machine wedged between my hands.

The ROG Ally performance isn’t what ASUS sold, but it’s still a good bit faster than Steam Deck, and most games I’ve tried I can hit a visual and performance fidelity roughly on par with an Xbox Series S. Which ain’t bad at all.

Both are convenent and versitile systems, I think probably Steam Deck is more convenient whereas ROG Ally is more versatile.

And can choose amongst thousands of such instances

Kinda glossing over that point.

Maybe an optimistic take: people moving = people realising they can move. Eventually some of them may also realise they can move to a platform that’s not controlled by a shitty corpo.

Alan Wake Remaster is a decent inclusion 👍

Yep, vote with your feet is all that we’ve got, and shouldn’t be underestimated.

Or the owner of 100 cats, who also happen to smoke a pack a day each?

It’s almost bizarre to me how fully featured and polished wefwef.app is. Really amazing.

That’s so short sighted.

I don’t like exclusivity deals and platform fragmentation either, I think it’s anti-consumer. But to be fair I don’t think the Microsoft deal is just about that.

Microsoft’s market cap is something like 23x that of Sony’s; the reason they are in 3rd place is entirely down to mismanagement. It’s pretty typical for Microsoft to find themselves in this position in many of the markets they have chosen to occupy over the decades, and so they instead use their deep pockets to buy their way to being market leaders. Microsoft have a long history of using acquisitions to buy out or block competitors, to the detriment of the market.

We saw what happened when Microsoft got a whiff of success in the 360 era. The Xbox One was anti-gamer and anti-consumer, and it didn’t happen by accident: that’s straight out of Microsoft’s playbook.

The increased competition might be nice in the short term, but it gives Microsoft an opportunity to disproportionately influence the gaming industry for decades into the future imo.

I understand the point you are making, but combating market consolidation with more market consolidation doesn’t help consumers in the long term.

I don’t see how market consolidation benefits consumers. I’m not sure that I understand the point you are making?

Lately, PS Plus has felt like a better GamePass than GamePass. That almost certainly wouldn’t be the case if there is further market consolidation.

So I get Microsoft’s angle but ultimately I want to see them both compete for value and monopolies don’t do that. Also we’ve seen what Microsoft do with monopolies…

I feel weird supporting Zuck, but the thought of someone knocking that shit-eating grin off Elon’s face…