No, but it’s been getting stronger relative to the dollar consistently over the past 2 years. But we aren’t seeing that in prices.
I’m not expecting it to be like ~2007 time where £1 was $2.
But things should definitely be better than it was 2 years ago, relative to USD pricing.
The PS5 Pro pricing is testing the waters for PS6 pricing. If they can’t sell well, they can easily drop prices (the PS5 Pro barely costs more than the PS5 to produce). They’re just gathering data on what people will accept.
Doing that with the PS6 is too risky. Sony botched the launch of the PS3 and it backfired on them hard letting MS get a foothold with the 360. MS then did the same with the XBone launch and the PS4 ran away with it.
If people signal to Sony now that the PS5 Pro is way too much (it’s £700/$913 here ffs), then the PS6 will be cheaper. Don’t accept their greed.
If you think $700 is bad, it’s £700 in the UK… which is $913. 🤢
Also:
median household income, UK (2022): £32,400 ($42,265)
median household income, USA (2022): $74,580
A PS5 Pro is 26% of the typical UK household monthly income.
A PS5 Pro is 11% of the typical US household monthly income.
The US pricing is bad. The UK pricing is absolutely insane.
The OLED Deck starts at £479. Still a lot but not as egregious. The LCD Deck is currently £262 ($344), which is pretty great.
Based on my pricing…
LCD Deck: starting at £262 ($344)
OLED Deck: starting at £479 ($630)
It’s certainly better. But by enough to justify an 83% higher price? You may as well be saying why buy a MX-5/Miata when a Porsche Boxster 718 is better.
I think Plasma BigScreen has been effectively abandoned.
BigScreen is also basically no longer in development, IIRC.
That’s a poor comparison, as Black Myth has just come out and games take a long time to develop. And the Steam Deck 2 literally doesn’t exist yet.
If Nintendo announced a Switch 2 tomorrow, saying it’s compatible with existing Switch games, do you think sales of the Switch would go up, or down?
Dolphin is such a well fleshed out emulation monster that I’m consistently disappointed with other emulators that don’t let me tweak things quite to the same degree
And yet despite the options, it’s not overwhelming like a lot of other highly-configurable software often is. They’ve done such an amazing job.
For anybody confused – or I guess for anybody who wants Dolphin as a Flatpak immediately – Dolphin is already available on Flathub, it just currently isn’t verified. It’s packaged by a third party.
Honestly it’s great to see more first party support for Flatpaks/Flathub.
It’s weird that Valve hasn’t with Steam tbh - they already use Flatpaks/Flathub on the deck, and they’ve asked people not to use Ubuntu’s Snaps (competing app packaging standard to Flatpak) version of Steam, or system packages for other distros - saying that you should only use SteamOS, the latest Ubuntu with a .deb package, or the Flatpak (which is unofficial!!). Just make it official, Valve! Telling people to use it when it’s unofficial seems weird.
Anyway, compliments to the Dolphin team, it’s probably the most impressive emulator I’ve ever used.
And the 3DS emulator that the same team also created!
Tim Sweeney being so against Linux is baffling to me.
You’d think that with Epic battling against Apple and Google’s mobile ecosystems that he’d think “huh, we really shouldn’t put all our eggs in the Windows basket, what with Microsoft clearly trying to go down the locked-down mobile-like route for Windows”, but he doesn’t. He’s just relying on Microsoft’s goodwill (lol). It’s crazy.
It’s testament to Microsoft’s incompetence that they still haven’t got an “Xbox handheld OS” so-to-speak, or at the very least offered a trimmed down windows with an Xbox UI frontend to handheld OEMs.
The Steam Deck is a success, there’s other handhelds on the market (a common review criticism often being how poor windows works on them), Sony is in discussions with AMD for hardware for a handheld (albeit it’s a long way off).
MS’s incompetence in gaming is staggering.
Open source just means you can get the source code, it doesn’t mean you can take over a project.
Asus can’t just take SteamOS, apply some driver tweaks, change some options, and release it as a SteamOS device.
A lot of SteamOS is proprietary, and Valve of course owns all the IP related to the branding. Asus literally needs Valve’s blessing to do it.
Asus are certainly welcome to help Valve with their code, but Valve could also say no this is our project.
And of course they can fork the open part of SteamOS and brand it as something else, and not install steam/steamUI, but that’s half the reason people use the steam deck. It wouldn’t be SteamOS without that.
You don’t think the developers of SteamOS should be the ones working on SteamOS?
It’s had a revision which appears to have fixed that, and brought other improvements.
However it also came with a price bump, and Asus has been under fire recently for awful handling of warranties all across their business
Yeah this is more like what Linux was like to install in the 90s or very early 2000s.
Installers haven’t really changed in the past 10 years
That’s true, although it’s the same with the whole vinyl skin industry in my experience.
The markup on what is essentially a pretty sticker is so insane that they’d be foolish for not just sending out replacements willy-nilly to anybody who needs them. The materials cost is close to zero, and being a 5 gram envelope, postage costs are practically nothing too.
It’s an extremely reasonable opinion, no?
For example, Nintendo make excellent games. Almost everything they make is a good game.
But they are an awful company due to how litigious they are, their hatred of fan projects, their clampdowns on people just streaming their games, their cloud save policy, and how they just shut their eShops prematurely locking you out from your purchases.
You’re acting like “like the product, dislike the company” is an absurd take, and it very much isn’t.
Intel graphics has improved leaps and bounds but it’s still problematic and more poorly supported than AMD.
I imagine part of it (beyond general stuff like Intel trailing AMD in efficiency, both on the CPU and GPU side, as well as the die size being far larger for the same performance, meaning more expensive) is that Valve really didn’t want Intel graphics issues being reported in reviews and forums as being Proton/Linux issues.
On top of that, Intel straight up doesn’t have a custom semiconductor division. AMD does (predominantly for Xbox/PS, but they’re not the only ones).
Intel would either have to set up an entirely new working group for Valve (expensive! Something that Valve would’ve wanted to avoid considering they had no idea whether the Deck would be a hit or not) or they’d have had to go with an off-the-shelf intel CPU.
So the most comparable console there is $456, and this is $700.
That is bad.
The PS5 Pro barely costs more to produce.
$700 is bad. $913 is awful.
Just because the PS3, a console universally panned as being way too expensive, was similar, doesn’t mean PS5 Pro pricing is alright.