Let’s draw a conclusion first: in addition to Steam Deck, Windows handheld has more or less IQ tax.
If we want to go back to the birth history of the game console, we need to pull the timeline back to 1976. Mattel Electronics Handheld Games, developed by Gome and Mattel, is the earliest handheld ancestor who used LED in video games.
Since its birth, the handheld has occupied a place in the era of PC and game console with its portability and unique game experience.
But when Sony began to give up the handheld market, we began to realize that performance alone is not enough for handheld devices to do well. Game lineup and software ecology are the core competitiveness of handheld devices.
The birth and development of smart phones have further expanded the threshold for entering the handheld industry, and the traditional handheld market has shrunk dramatically since 2010. At present, it can be called two successful models — — Nintendo Switch produced by Nintendo and Steam Deck produced by Valve, in which Switch is a different kind of handheld, we will not list it for the time being, but the road that Steam Deck is taking is more worth discussing.
What if there is no upstream game developer to develop exclusive games for the device? Two conventional ideas:
1. Improve the performance of the equipment to run the ready-made Windows system and solve the problem of the game lineup, which is what most Win handhelds are doing. 2. Optimize the existing all-platform games and their own devices to adapt to this kind of game, which is the way Steam Deck is taking. The reality is that Win handheld manufacturers are using two ideas to design products in parallel, but the emphasis is different.
Take AYANEO’s latest release, AYANEO2, for example. It is equipped with AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor and 50.25Wh battery to provide good performance.
At the same time, based on Linux system, AYANEO launched the self-developed AYANEO OS. AYANEO claimed that players can have more efficient operation, lower power consumption, more elegant interactive interface and more immersive experience on this system.
We can see AYANEO’s optimization for user experience and game compatibility, and also positively affirm its efforts and achievements, but it is still unavoidable that it adopts the same architecture as a computer and runs a computer system, which is still a Windows-based product in essence.
Whether it’s AYANEO, OnexPlayer or GPD, this kind of brand adopts Windows system or products that support the installation of Windows system. In terms of game ecology, it can directly call the game library on the PC side, and the games that Windows notebooks can run can also be run by these Windows handhelds. Moreover, the mature Windows system also reduces the development difficulty and cost of these brands.
However, Win handheld is a tricky way to solve the shortage of game lineup after all, and Windows is not a system specially developed for games and game consoles after all. Transplanting the system to handheld still needs a lot of adaptation from manufacturers. It should be noted that blue screen, software flashback, automatic update, incompatible drivers, missing driver files and other problems that all Windows computers will encounter in the process of installing and running games may appear on it.
The brand of Win handheld has no bargaining power in the face of chip manufacturers because of its size. Basically, they use whatever is in the supply chain. Therefore, due to the limitation of power supply and volume, the early Win handheld can only use the mobile platform, and the weak performance of Intel UHD Graphics can only feed some independent games or simulators with low configuration requirements.
It was not until Su Ma did something that was good for the thin notebook and Win handheld, and launched an APU scheme with low power consumption and high energy efficiency ratio. It can be said that it was not until the appearance of AMD Ryzen 4000 series that Win handheld developers had a chip scheme with excellent performance and power consumption, and Win handheld finally had the basic ability to run 3A games.
Take AMDRyzen 7 6800U processor carried by AYANEO 2 as an example, it adopts 6nm technology, Zen3+CPU architecture, 8 cores and 16 threads, 2.7-4.GHz frequency, 4MB second-level cache and 16MB third-level cache, and integrates Radeon 680M GPU, RDNA2 architecture and 768 stream processors in 12 units. However, the performance of RDNA2 can also be equivalent to that of notebook.
Steam Deck, on the other hand, has put a lot of effort into optimization. SteamDeck uses a 4-core 8-thread processing chip based on AMD Zen2 architecture, while the GPU part uses 8 sets of AMD RDNA2 computing units, and the floating-point computing power can reach up to 1.6 TFlops FP32. It belongs to a chip customized by AMD for Steam Deck, and its performance is not high.
However, Valve has made some games specially optimized for Steam Deck through powerful developer channels, and at the same time, it has given some initiative to users through the convenient and sophisticated energy consumption control system provided by Steam OS. Players can choose to run the game with high image quality and high power consumption, or they can choose to run with low image quality and low power consumption. It not only satisfies the players who pursue experience, but also satisfies the players who pay more attention to portability, which can be described as a win-win situation.
Why does the game console compete with the smart phone?
For hardcore players, there is no competition between handheld and mobile phones at all. However, it is difficult for users who have been educated by the smartphone experience to accept a game console with a battery life of only a few hours and a weight of more than 600g g.
Today’s Win handheld battery life is about 2-8 hours (the battery life fluctuates obviously due to different operating loads), and most of them weigh more than 600g (the weight of Steam Deck is about 669 g, the weight of AYANEO 2 is about 680g, and the weight of Switch is about 398 g). Compared with the mobile phone with a weight of less than 250g, the game handheld obviously has a lot of room for improvement.
Just like the GAMEGEAR launched by Sega in those days, it was equipped with an extremely advanced color LCD screen at that time, with huge power consumption, and the result of high performance was that the body was very heavy, and the game lasted only a short time of 3 hours, far less than the 8-hour battery life of GB at that time, which became the biggest injury of Game Gear. No matter how Sega invested in software, it was difficult to reverse the unfavorable situation.
Of course, the most important thing is that with the rapid improvement of the performance of smart phone processors, more and more game developers choose to transplant games to the mobile terminal under the temptation of the huge mobile phone market. After all, it has long been an indisputable fact that mobile game revenue surpasses PC.
In 2012, when the end-game manufacturers were still discussing whether to enter the mobile game, the iOS version of Shenxiandao was launched, becoming the first test product of horizontal RPG page tour on the mobile platform. Subsequently, old-fashioned client games such as Legend, Stars Change and Dream Zhu Xian also began to make cross-platform attempts.
The adaptation of end-game IP to mobile games has become a "shortcut" for the development of major game companies, including many shoddy game products. Until 2015, with the upgrade of smart phone hardware and the leap of mobile game quality, the original end-game was restored with the mobile game versions of Crossing the Fire Line, Crossing the Fire Line: The King of Gunfight, QQ Speeding, Go-karting, etc., and the quality was infinitely close to that of PC-side mobile games, which opened a new era of end-game transplantation. In recent years, games such as League of Legends Mobile Games, Moore Manor and Apex Hero have achieved good results on the mobile side.
In addition to online games, you can also find a large number of Steam porting games on the TapTap platform. Whether it is a foreign studio or a domestic manufacturer, high-scoring games on Steam are non-stop porting to the mobile terminal. At the same time, the time interval of putting a mobile terminal on a host or PC becomes shorter and shorter, and the difference in game content becomes smaller and smaller. Whether it’s a PC, a mobile phone, an iPad or a host, it’s just a part of the multi-platform or cross-platform revenue plan of game makers.
At the previous Blizzard Carnival, Call of Duty, one of the company’s most "valuable" IPs, announced that it would launch a mobile version. However, according to the subsequent exposure of the gameplay, the single-player campaign mode is obviously not of interest to Blizzard. After all, this kind of "buyout" gameplay is difficult for players to have sustained pleasure, and the second is that it can’t make manufacturers profit through microtransactions. Moreover, PC-side players belong to more serious strength groups. I don’t care much about these fancy gift boxes, but mobile games are likely to be another situation. Nowadays, mobile games pay attention to "krypton gold", and the relatively fair mode of "escape" is also the "shelter" of this krypton gold mode. The record is not important. The role in the game is to show off capital. In addition, the popularity of smart phones is increasing year by year, so it is hard not to be sure that such a large-scale IP mobile game will be held.
Nowadays, more and more PC-side games are transplanted to the mobile side, and some mobile-side games have also entered the PC side after upgrading their quality. Three-terminal interoperability, even multi-terminal interoperability of platforms such as hosts, may be the inevitable trend of future market development. When the ecological barrier is gradually broken, Win handheld will still have its core competitiveness in the face of the huge user group in the smart phone market. I think this will be a problem that all Win handheld brands need to think about and urgently solve in the future.