No, the problem is obsolescence of the hardware. It is the same reason why gaming laptops are a niche market filled with overpriced machines that explode because there are very few adequate cooling solutions. Steam Deck is not just a tiny PC, Steam Deck is an inferior tiny PC.
The Steam Deck is going to go obsolete and it will happen sooner rather than later. Some people might even laugh at the specs it is currently stated to ship with. Software will leave this device behind. And that is not a problem with desktops, consoles, and even some of the aforementioned ridiculous gaming laptops. It will be a problem with Steam Deck. It is being marketed as the high-end PC experience in a handheld. And you cannot upgrade upgrade the Steam Deck as far as I can tell, which is yet another major benefit of owning and maintaining a PC. That experience will lag behind rapidly and diminish one of the two primary selling points (the other being portability).
And to that end, I have serious questions as to the efficacy of the device's portability. Battery life will leave much to be desired, people will complain about the screen size and resolution, the device is going to be a nightmare to keep cool and it is fragile and heavy. There are issues abound with this that cut into perceived benefits.
except people buy consoles, and they buy millions of them. the switch is literally a failed nvidia mobile chip. if people would care about upgrades or performance no one would buy any of those, yet here we are. people still play on hardware that was outdated when it was released
8 years ago. games for at least a few years more will be released with that outdated hardware in mind given it's install base and lack of next gen adoption so far.
in terms of numbers, 69% steam users still run 1080p. another roughly 10% wxga (768p if you wanna go with that). 4k is a bit above
2%; from the resolution alone I highly doubt it will be obsolete anytime soon. if you look at the rest of the
hardware survey which I'm too lazy to dig through a lot of those are on par to the resolution specs, with quite a few laptops in the mix (not sure if you can even still buy wxga monitors). which you can't upgrade either, let alone have high performance.
>It is being marketed as the high-end PC experience in a handheld.
by whom? the same people that claim the next switch will be 4k? and again, which games that would require a "high-end" pc would people play on a steam deck in the first place? how many heavy 3d games with high hardware requirements at
800p are there even? AAA games are hardly the majority of games released on pc, and focusing on those is outright consoletard mentality. which means the less hardware intensive the game, the longer your battery will run, never mind "portable" doesn't mean you'll never be around any outlets.
this also assumes everyone on pc is literally a mustard, which simply isn't the case, see the numbers above. and unless there is a magical technological breakthrough anytime soon the big jumps have ended. fuck if anyone wants to shitpost he would simply need to run crysis from 2007 on a steam deck which holds up to this day. this reads again like some consoletard perspective where a SSD is something mindblowing and unheard off.
