With the same or better battery life with a processor and memory upgrade, not a bad deal.

Makes sense, even just for playing old games it’s more optimal. Be it for graphics, load times, or just multiplayer if you want to play a game from say the Xbox 360 PS3 era its probably better to just get the game on PC. Also given how much of a relative flop the current console generation has been yeah…

All those things you have to deal with at least once.

So for someone who doesn’t know how to do any of them, it is a barrier of entry. Why should they learn when they could just buy a cheaper box and be done with it?

That is the thing, consoles don’t experience issues for the user, like ever.

If they do encounter an issue, it is up to the developer to fix them, not themselves.

If it is a hardware issue, they just bring it into the shop where they bought it or buy a new one.

That is the power of having standardized hardware/software. You offload every single technical knowledge you should posses in order to use it to the companies.

It is the same with cars. Some people like to tinker with it. Others are afraid they will make it worse if they do anything themselves, including changing oil.

That’s a reasonable idea. It’s just hard to fathom why this is a feature not commonly supported on PC despite being available on less powerful consoles. To play local co-op on PC, I need to buy the full series for each additional player who are then required to have their own hardware. Not economical when you just want to play with your kids.

Suddenly it seems reasonable to buy one console and one copy of the game.

I believe steam remote play and Family Sharing are both designed to accommodate that issue - although that doesn’t solve the hardware problem admittedly.

I’ll have to look into that. My understanding was that only one account in the family could play the same copy at a time.

For LAN/Offline play I believe there’s no limitation. You can also have “multiple” copies (get the game for 5 bucks on a steam sale compared to console), for multiple user online play.

Remote play is for games that support local multiplayer to have another user “route in”.

If you can’t even purchase a game on a console, you will never struggle to get it to run or pick it up at retail only to find when you get home that your TPM/secureboot config isn’t up to snuff, which is the bleeding edge trend.

I wish the verification process was bulletproof, but it’s not. Stuff like Eternal Strands get released and manage that coveted green checkmark, but end up performing poorly and looking like hot garbage. Looks and plays great on a normal PC though.

Generally the verified deck games are great but the verified profile for that game just… isn’t. It’s certainly playable, but the framerate drops are frustrating in a game that isn’t very easy. There’s no particular objective measurement that gives a game a certain level that i’m aware of.

Then there are games that are given a black mark of “unsupported” by the Steam Deck verification system but run wonderfully like Ghost of Tsushima. There’s a multiplayer mode in the almost exclusively single player open world RPG that doesn’t work on the deck, so it’s entirely disqualified despite being completely functional, absolutely gorgeous and running at very solid framerates on the deck.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the deck and think it’s a giant leap in the right direction with PC gaming, making it a lot more console-like for the plebs. I am realistic for this though. It’s still a poweruser tier device, especially if you want to play niche games or indie titles. The best experience imo is when you tinker and get it to run all manner of programs from competing app stores… and then you’re completely away from the on-rails console-like experience. Even getting chiaki4deck going is a poweruser task.

before you got a steam deck you hallucinated your imaginary pc with an imaginary gpu?

One area that I’m glad to have my console is for games that I expect the publisher to include anti-consumer bs but I still want to play. I dont gaf if they install a kernel mode anti-cheat on my ps5, but I’ll never install that on my PC.

That said, I don’t spend much time doing that anyways and don’t have any plans to get another console in the future. And in case nintendo is listening, the switch 2 would have been an exception to that if you weren’t so lawsuit happy.

Valve did it again with the Steam Deck. I hated first person in general with a controller. Now I prefer to play Deck over mouse.

It’s a wink wink situation

I play both. Couch gaming is simply more epic (also comfy). Glorious 7.1 surround on a couch? chefs kiss