As the Steam Deck slowly marches toward its fifth birthday next February, owners are likely eager for a way to extend its life rather than investing in expensive high-end competition.
With the AI bubble and the cost increases that come with it game developers are coming back around to the Steam Deck’s specs.
I think that’s part of the plan and risk of AI. They will try and rent cpu usage and knowledge. Hopefully, they don’t succeed and instead we have open source AI and less dependence on tech. Even without a crash.
As much as demand for ram and video cards is killing everyone currently, there should be an increase in supply if it’s prolonged enough. Even without a crash.
Now, add a crash and we may have better home ram and video cards for cheap. I think given American volatility, and tech enshittification, people no longer trust the cloud and are moving away from it. They are also sick of subscriptions.
Last time they tried it for gaming - with Stadia - it failed miserable.
It makes some sense for things like office applications (though of late the trust in using American and American-owned service providers for that has plummeted, at least in Europe), but for gaming it has so far failed miserably.
Even the whole artificial bottleneck of data centers being the only place where the most advanced hardware can be found would only translate into gaming moving to be cloud-based if game makers did not react to the current PC components crush by reducing the hardware demand of their products and instead all fully bet on cloud-based gaming as the future, a stupid bet at multiple levels not only due to the risk that gamers would overwhelming chose the games of those game makers who dissented and fit their games to the available home PC hardware instead of the cloud-based one but also because it could give massive influence over the success or not of those games to the cloud gaming services suppliers who could just demand more money to run it in their systems at all or to run them at higher speeds.
In summary, the idea that gaming would shift towards cloud-based gaming instead of going in the direction of continuing supporting last gen hardware, isn’t really supported by the results of past attempts at that or the comparative business outcomes for game maker from chosing one over the other.
Honestly, the Steamdeck has a really good mix of components to ensure gaming for a decent while.
My Steamdeck now costs more than what i paid for it. The last time something like that happened was with the GPU shortages, I had just bought the RTX 3070 and then prices skyrocketed.
Weird times indeed. As someone who also got a ps5 before the price hikes and without having paid extra to a scalper, this has happened to me multiple times now where hardware increases in value. Since i’m not looking to sell any of it it doesn’t mean much in practice, but still wild to think about.
With the AI bubble and the cost increases that come with it game developers are coming back around to the Steam Deck’s specs.
That’s probably the only good part of the AI bubble. Now they have to optimize and think about doing more with the same hardware.
The best part about Valve and Linux is how it always keeps improving. Like reverse-planned-obsolescence.
Or we all will just be pushed towards cloud services
I think that’s part of the plan and risk of AI. They will try and rent cpu usage and knowledge. Hopefully, they don’t succeed and instead we have open source AI and less dependence on tech. Even without a crash.
As much as demand for ram and video cards is killing everyone currently, there should be an increase in supply if it’s prolonged enough. Even without a crash.
Now, add a crash and we may have better home ram and video cards for cheap. I think given American volatility, and tech enshittification, people no longer trust the cloud and are moving away from it. They are also sick of subscriptions.
Wouldnt that require every single developer to stop making games for low end hardware and for the older games to disappear?
Resist and tell everyone you know why they also should.
Last time they tried it for gaming - with Stadia - it failed miserable.
It makes some sense for things like office applications (though of late the trust in using American and American-owned service providers for that has plummeted, at least in Europe), but for gaming it has so far failed miserably.
Even the whole artificial bottleneck of data centers being the only place where the most advanced hardware can be found would only translate into gaming moving to be cloud-based if game makers did not react to the current PC components crush by reducing the hardware demand of their products and instead all fully bet on cloud-based gaming as the future, a stupid bet at multiple levels not only due to the risk that gamers would overwhelming chose the games of those game makers who dissented and fit their games to the available home PC hardware instead of the cloud-based one but also because it could give massive influence over the success or not of those games to the cloud gaming services suppliers who could just demand more money to run it in their systems at all or to run them at higher speeds.
In summary, the idea that gaming would shift towards cloud-based gaming instead of going in the direction of continuing supporting last gen hardware, isn’t really supported by the results of past attempts at that or the comparative business outcomes for game maker from chosing one over the other.
Yeah, and with indie games being better quality, more affordable and requiring less resources than games from AAA studios.
Honestly, the Steamdeck has a really good mix of components to ensure gaming for a decent while.
My Steamdeck now costs more than what i paid for it. The last time something like that happened was with the GPU shortages, I had just bought the RTX 3070 and then prices skyrocketed.
Weird times indeed. As someone who also got a ps5 before the price hikes and without having paid extra to a scalper, this has happened to me multiple times now where hardware increases in value. Since i’m not looking to sell any of it it doesn’t mean much in practice, but still wild to think about.