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cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/3922769
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The original was posted on /r/linustechtips by /u/RevolutionaryAd8204 on 2024-09-14 15:50:43+00:00.
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I’m not sure if it’s the meme but here (Europe) there is a huge difference in price between the basic 512GB OLED SD and the basic PS5 pro option.
569€ vs 800€.
… and you have to pay for PS Plus repetitively to play games with friends.
Jokes on you I don’t have any friends
If you think $700 is bad, it’s £700 in the UK… which is $913. 🤢
Also:
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median household income, UK (2022): £32,400 ($42,265)
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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.
If you think 26% is bad, in Russia it’s going to be priced at around ₽80-100k(~$883, VAT included), but the median monthly salary is ₽43.500 - $480… That’s well over 100% median household income given that over 38% families only have a single parent. And I’m pretty sure that’s not even the worst out there, think like Argentina has an extortionate import tax or something?
If you think $700 is bad
I don’t:
Cool chart.
It really makes the point to me that the PS1 and PS2, when adjusted for inflation, and for relative compute power, were just such a fantastic deal.
I was recovering from some serious console-purchase fatigue, when I bought my PS1 to replace my garage sale purchased Super NES. It was a big deal to me.
I’ve paid PS5 prices (inflation adjusted) for a game system a few times (my first Switch and SteamDeck), but they’ve been a lot more mind blowing than what appears to be on offer today.
Disclaimer: My favorite game is 8-bit, anyway.
Also drives home the point the PS3 was insanely priced.
Charts like that are great, I love to see them. However, they need to have a year for the inflation-adjusted dollars else it’s nearly meaningless when referred back to.
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. $913 is awful.
Just because the PS3 (a console universally panned as being way too expensive) was similar doesn’t mean PS5 Pro pricing is alright.
I’m not sure what this proves 🤔
Anyone know the cost in the US including tax? Don’t they leave that off?
It varies state by state, some like Oregon have 0% tax, but most will be around
13%6-8% or so iirc.The highest state sales tax is 9.56%, most states are 6-8%. Though some major cities also have a small sales tax as well.
I live in Washington state and I’m pretty certain the sales tax here is 10% (slightly higher than your maximum figure of 9.56%). It’s a pretty well known trick here that you can account for tax just by decimal shifting and adding (ex: 5.29$ without would be 5.29$ + 0.529$ ~= 5.81$ with tax). Is that 9.56% an “in practice” figure that accounts for rounding down? I’m curious where you read it.
I found it on This website. WA is listed at 9.38%. I’m guessing your county or city has an additional sales tax.
That’s the average local + state sales tax in Washington. State sales tax is 6.5%, local varies from 1.2% - 3.85% (Seattle, for a total of 10.35%)
Thanks for the correction!
No sales tax in NH either.
how does this work if you live close to another state? As in if you live in a state with sales tax but down the road is a state without sales tax- why ever shop in your state?
Convenience. Unless you live right near the border, it’s probably faster/easier to shop in your own state than drive all the way to another.
But if you do live near the border of a state without a sales tax, then it’s pretty common to shop in the neighboring state, especially for larger purchases.
In Washington alcohol is so expensive that any reasonably sized party of alcoholics it’s cheaper to drive across the entire state to buy in Idaho (forgive this disaster of a sentence structure I’m awake like 5hr early because of cats)
As in if you live in a state with sales tax but down the road is a state without sales tax- why ever shop in your state?
Mostly the states are quite big, so it’s not worth the trouble. But along various state borders, it distorts the shopping experience in odd ways.
I’ve been to towns that are missing common retailers entirely, because everyone drives to the next town over (in another state), to avoid a tax.
We also have a rich history of driving across state lines to purchase stuff that’s illegal in our own state. It’s also illegal to bring it back, but the borders aren’t patrolled, so the only way to get caught is to have a traffic violation while doing it.
Or so I’ve heard. I never break any laws, myself.
To put details to other person’s point: Even if you lived pretty close, for a lot of things, the gas cost would probably offset a lot of the savings. For big things for sure it would make some sense but for other things it just wouldn’t make any sense. You’d have to live right on the border and have a town with stores that carry whatever you’re buying also be pretty close.
You still have to waste 30 minutes of your time driving over there. I’m not wasting 30 minutes of my time to save $5
In some cases like that, where you’re in a state that has no sales tax, but near the border of one that does, they’ll actually check ID and charge you sales tax if you’re from the sales tax state.
In most countries it’s the sale point which matters, not which state you reside in, for indirect tax. I would assume it’s the same in the US. For example if you’re on holiday in a different state or country, they wouldn’t charge what you’re charged back home.
Yep, but the states with sales tax get tired of getting cheated out of their tax revenue. The specific example where I saw this was a major hardware store chain in Oregon (no sales tax) right near the border of Washington (6.5% sales tax). They asked everyone “Washington or Oregon” at the register and checked ID for anyone who said Oregon.
Quick search says that Washington considers it a “sales and use” tax, so anything purchased out of state, but intended for use in Washington is supposed to be taxed. Kinda messed up, really.
Vancouver Washington residents drive to PDX for their jobs, to shop, eat dinner etc…
Texas has 8.25% but New Mexico is 5.125%
Sunland Park, NM (which is part of El Paso, TX metro are has an additional city+county tax of 2.125% so the taxes are the same as in Texas (the numbers may be slightly off, but the final tax rate is very close to Texas)
The US doesn’t have a national sales tax, so it depends whether the individual state imposes a tax or not.
I don’t remember exactly, but some relative poverty lines start at 60% of median household income.
- £700 / (£32,400 * .6 / 12) ≈ .43, thus 43% of monthly income for a poor household in the UK
- $700 / ($74,580 * .6 / 12) ≈ .19, thus 19% of monthly income for a poor household in the US
I hope median household income is netto, otherwise this is skewed.
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And for those who have not tried it, the desktop is fully functional (not some half baked version. My son uses the desktop mode as a full school workstation for internet browsing, email, teams, Google docs, etc
More people should thank KDE for the desktop mode.
Indeed… I avoided it for years because I bought into the “it’s too heavy” narrative.
Then I saw a phoronics benchmark sayin it was actually faster and lighter than lxde if you turn effects off
I tried it then and was blown away, never looked back
I don’t know what the KDE devs eat, but they are somehow maximising both features and performance.
Incredible.
I don’t know what the KDE devs eat
LOL loved that
That sells it for me. Steam Deck is in my future. Windows will not be my next OS.
I pretty much only use mine in desktop mode and I’m currently playing world of warcraft on it lol!
To me, it’s looking like a replacement for a PC and a portable device, and does not need to compete against a console. And that’s what I’m looking for. I’m just sick of the rising price of video cards, and the worsening state of Windows. I’ve had plans to upgrade my video card for a while now, and could never justify it. I feel like it’s as viable now to get a Deck and a PS5 Slim or a Pro than to get a PC and another portable. PC gobbles up too much power as a desktop nowadays and too expensive as a premium machine.
It was my steam deck that convinced me to just wipe windows from my laptop and install Kubuntu which is basically the same as steamOS. I had no idea Linux desktop was so good these days. Bye bye windows! I love my steam deck but I also still need a laptop form factor, I can’t always dock it and use it as my PC.
That is KDE Plasma for those who are curious. It is one of the main desktop environments in Linux. It is my daily driver on my main PC. It is the most customizable desktop I know of. There is nothing you can’t change.
Hi there, just a small correction. Compared to existing linux distros, it’s slightly different. Steam OS is an immutable OS, which means you can’t edit the root partition (Like you can’t edit the C:\ drive in Windows). This is both good and bad.
Good -> Users can’t mess up their device while trying to mess around with it. Updates are smooth because Valve knows the previous state of the OS.
Bad -> It’s bad only for extreme power users as it’s not fully customizable. You can’t run your own kernel, install certain build packages to do some advanced stuff. But this is a tiny tiny bad.
Overall, Steam OS is great and I believe will be the gateway for the general PC crowd.
Thank you for the correction, although I was only talking about the desktop environment. I understand the immutable part of it :)
I’m using Fedora KDE right now for their Wayland support, because I wanted stuff like FreeSync on my AMD GPU, but I do miss Cinnamon. And Autokey.
Thanks to KDE on the SD, I’ve switched my main DE on my desktop. Still have a soft spot for XFCE, but KDE Plasma on the SD was polished and was very “coherent”.
One thing the SD is missing for being a complete “serious” computer is printing support. I’m sure I could it installed, the SD is eminently hackable, but a Flatpak solution or a Steam default solution would really justify using a SD in Desktop mode for school and work.
It doesn’t have cups? You should be able to install it and plasma’s ctrl+p should work with it.
I had to use mine as a desktop for two weeks while my PC was undergoing a repair. It was wholly uneventful: installed OpenOffice and had a wholly normal workweek. It’s perfectly fine to use as a regular, boring desktop if you need it to. Absolutely love the Steamdeck. Every gamer should have one.
I’ve been complaining about printer support. It’s pretty much the last piece of the puzzle for a school focused SD.
There’s a workaround where you can install Chrome then install ipp/cups printing from the chrome web store, then save whatever file you need printed to Google docs.
I used mine for a few months for work. only problem i had with it was it struggled with multiple external monitors. i got it working but i had to fiddle with xrandr everytime i docked it and put it into desktop mode
This was a couple years ago now though, it might be better now.
Eventually, Sony will stop supporting the PS5 and it’ll be a brick. If Valve ever stops supporting the Steamdeck, it’ll keep running.
All (most?) of your games will run on your future computers.
You can play DOS games just fine right now, so yes it’s a good bet. And a far better bet than the PS6 being backwards compatible.
The crazy thing for me is that I have a little handheld specific for dos games. The problem I run into every time is having to setup computer keyboard bindings for each game to play them using the built-in controller. I really want retroarch or another dos emulator to do profiles for different games and I haven’t seen that yet.
Unless they change CPU architectures.
And even then it’s no guarantee. Plenty of games needed support from the likes of GoG to run. Hell, I couldn’t even play Ex Machina because I had a HDR monitor and the game detected that and completely broke. Disabling HDR in Windows did nothing.
Unless they change CPU architectures.
well. there’s already winlator (basically box86 / wine-wrapper for android).
Not as polished and far as Proton is, but the bones are there.A CPU architecture change wouldn’t be a deathblow.
Ex Machina the movie or the 1984 “game”? That’s before Mario was even a thing.
Fucking auto correct…
It was Nex Machina.
That’s a 2017 game
Yes, I know. And I already can’t play it due to changes in hardware.
That doesn’t make any sense. I can play multiple games from 2017 with no problem at all. I play games from 2012 and up just fine too. That’s something the devs messed up for that specific game, or it’s a problem with your PC.
After over 3 decades as a gamer and tech user this is maybe the single most consistent important benefit for any open platform were you can just install Linux.
The rest is nice but this one means that 10 or 20 years from now your hardware might have been repurposed for something else and still be useful and in use whilst a closed platform will just be more junk in a junkyard or sitting in a box of those things you’ve kept just because you don’t like to throw expensive stuff away but will in practice never use again.
Also I’m that scenario, you know Valve only gave it up for something dramatically better.
Device, maybe. What happens to the games bought from a DRM monopoly?
It plays piracy-reclaimed games just fine.
While valve has a lot of deserved goodwill, that’s always the problem - they’re well-behaved, but set up in a way in which the customer has no leverage if they where to change their approach tommorow.
Good thing drm-free games run just as well on the steam deck.
These devices have different use cases. Steam Deck also is digital only. If a publisher decides to kill a game, they can control whether you can or can’t play the game. PS5 Pro is expensive, but so are video cards nowadays. PS5 Pro is just following a trend set years before, including the shift from physical games and cost. The only way to stop anti-consumer trends is to stop buying expensive hardware (PS5 Pro included). Also, give some love to physical copies of games.
Saying the Steam Deck is digital only is like saying a tower computer is digital only. That’s purely false. If you can put it on a tower computer, you can put it on the Steam Deck.
All the Steam Deck, like many modern tower computers, needs for physical copies is a USB media reader.
If we can argue that Sony will stop supporting the PS5 in the future, who’s to say in the future, (without the good leadership), Steam won’t restrict what can be put on the Steam Deck? We have a lot of arguments for wanting a Steam Deck and an alternative OS to boot for gaming, but saying PS5 will be bricked in the future is not a strong one.
Because the Steam Deck is just computer hardware. I can already install whatever OS I want to and Steam won’t know that it’s a Steam Deck anymore.
- Take Steam Deck
- Wipe OS and install Bazzite/Nobara
- Install Heroic Launcher / Non Steam Launcher
- Install games from them
Nuclear apocalypse happens and internet is down
- Get ISOs of games in a USB drive
- Plug it into the deck and install
Beacause, Today, I can already load another OS on the Steamdeck. Not so much on the PS5.
You know what the main difference between the Steam Deck OLED and the PS5 Pro is? Customers wanted and asked for the Steam Deck OLED.
I really like my PS5, but I see no value in a model costing 80% more and being only current for half a generation.
All that for an “up to” 40% performance increase.
I don’t care how much of a graphics nerd someone is, that just isn’t worth it.
And if you’re that much of a graphics nerd, you own a PC.
A game that was released last year has absolutely zero knowledge of this 8k PS5 so it’s not going to magically render at 8k or 40% improvement. Some might get a framerate bump if frame sync can be turned off - the game might have been GPU bound and therefore with a better GPU it yields a better framerate. Sometimes. And AI upscaling might give a pseudo > 4k effect but it’s not really true 8k.
A handful of games might get patched to avail of the improved rendering capabilities when they detect PS5 Pro. Minimal stuff really. Maybe the config file will improve draw distance or turn on certain effects like raytraced shadows / reflections when it knows the console can handle it.
Hardly seems worth the vast additional expense especially if somebody already owns a PS5 though. Moreso because Sony are trying to stiff people into buying the cheaper “digital” version which basically means any physical collection won’t work with it.
Sales on PSN are appalling compared to Steam as well. Plus you can also get Steam sales on other sites like Fanatical.
Steam also has better remote play, and Steam custom controller profiles with nearly any controller are amazing.
Also nearly no backwards compatibility issues, whereas PS5 will only play/stream limited games from the past.
The PlayStation store is also a miserable shopping experience. If you don’t know what game you want or just want to browse, good fucking luck finding it there. No screenshots, no gameplay, no user reviews, no related games to compare to, no info about if your friends are wishlisting or playing it. Just a choice of buying the expensive version or the more expensive version, and good luck figuring out which DLC is already included in the deluxe editions.
Shit yeah, no wishlisting, no ignoring, no gifting. Its pathetic.
At least the original PS3 store was decent for its time, but they ruined that.
I honestly realy dont mind lack of info but the loading time is horrendus if you want to browse current sales or just check the game info . And while my internet is not that great there is a day and night diffrence between steam and Psstore.
PS remote play is fantastic (for what remote play is. Streaming still sucks.)
Playstation Remote Play is garbage no matter the location or setup. I’ve tried many over many years in multiple houses. Sony is horrible at this.
Chiaki for Steam Deck/PC and PSPlay app for Android are insanely better quality for remote playing Playstation.
I have massively better quality, stability, and latency with the RemotePlay app over the internet from PS5 than I do with Steam in home streaming actually in my house. It’s still not good enough for high precision games, but Steam isn’t close.
PS4 can’t stream for shit because it can’t do the encoding.
PC streaming is extremely hit and miss. I ended up with Moonlight/Sunshine for playing from my nVidia Shield and that works a charm. Steam streaming never quite worked right. There’s a ton of options, and unless you pick exactly the right ones for your setup, it’ll do stupid things.
Interesting. My Steam remote playing from my PC through my house is excellent. I do it to my Steam Link, I used to do it to my phone, and now I also do it to my Steam Deck.
It’s the Playstation-made remote play apps that suck on my PC or my phone.
Both my PC and my PS5 are hardwired the same to the router, and both have all the ports forwarded and blah blah.
My record that I’ve never been able to match in Tokyo Jungle was in remote play on the PSP from the PS3. When I got a PS Vita TV I tested remote play, got sidetracked and spent the afternoon playing Destiny. I’ve played a couple of times World of Tanks on the phone with the official app (and a gamepad obviously, I’m not insane lol).
Sony’s very, very good at this. Granted the AMD video encoding is not as good as the Nvidia one annoyingly, but it’s up there as average quality.
Now I will say this… if you ever tried it using WiFi? Yeah, for whatever reason Sony’s WiFi chips are a dumpster fire on home consoles, acceptable on handhelds. That would’ve entirely explained your experience.
Now, if you want actual garbage, look no further than the Xbox: when I got the Series S I tried it wired to my desktop, and it was a laggy, overly compressed mess. Far worse than the time I tried OnLive through a VPN because it was not available in Europe, and that’s an achievement.
Steam sales have been crap for years though.
You used to be able to pick up games a year after they came out for like £5 on a flash deal. These days stuff is still full retail price years after launch just so it looks better during the few sales a year. We need to get back to the days of cut price re-releases (Playstation Platinum).
I got a shitload of games from bundles though. That at least is cheap on PC, along with Epic delving into their Fortnite war chest to bribe us with actually free games.
Think the best way to game cheaply on consoles is to pick up physical discs second hand (although a lot of games don’t even launch on disc any more), and be on the higher tiers of PS Plus for all the games. There’s some really good stuff on there, more than enough to keep me busy.
Those flash deals were awesome, I pretty much stopped caring about sales when they ended. Now I mostly use the wishlist and wait for games to come down
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Was BG3 smooth? I’m getting jealous if it was. It’s a hot mess on my shitty PC.
I didn’t play much of it but it ran well when I tired it. I just decided it was the type of game I wanted to plat with all the settings maxed on my laptop.
It couldn’t play at max settings?
In general the Steam Deck is not the kind of device that is going to run things at max settings. You are gonna play at 720p30FPS low settings but be happy you can play at all on a train or airplane. It’s really meant to be a competitor to the Nintendo Switch than a replacement for a gaming PC.
You can stream from your PC to your couch or bed if you are at home.
Definitely not on Steam Deck.
I imagine certain scenes especially in the 3rd act would put alot of strain on the steam deck
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Steam Deck screen is only 800p so that’s the resolution for all games. And it’s perfect for the screen size.
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Yep quite right, I was just clarifying because you said “low res. 720p or maybe 480p” - the Steam Deck is 800p native. Total agreement.
I’m so glad Valve did not give in to the tech-number-nerds who want 2K resolution on tiny screens, saves so much battery life.
I’d be happy if it played Owlcat RPGs at near full settings. Those games are allot more fun than BG3, imo.
I digress though. It’d be nice to be able to play recent games again. If the deck can do that on my TV, I’m down.
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WotR for the win. never played Kingmaker. And I just got Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader. I don’t understand how these games aren’t more popular.
I feel like BG3 is big just because the camera zooms in close to the characters.
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I’m going to look up all of their games eventually. They go hard on the systems and that’s a severely lacking quality these days.
Rogue Trader is cool, I’m only a few hours into it though. But man, the camera kills me. It’s got a weird rubber band effect to it that I don’t like.
But it’s mostly a nice improvement, or at least some different takes, on the WotR systems. My main complaint about their games is even with auto end turn on it never automatically ends any turns.
We hook our Steam Deck up to a 4k projector and it looks amazing. The built in upscaler from 800p to 4k is astonishingly good. Obviously not AS good as native but and many games are limited to 30fps but holy smokes it’s more than good enough.
It is. From my experience a couple months back its crisp. Not the highest graphics, and it took a little getting used to from a high-end PC, but it was really nice. In certain aspects even preferable xD
It might do now. They’ve done a lot of improvements.
Even on PS5 it was an absolute mess in co-op. 30fps (if you were lucky) all round, constant freezes (several seconds) when swapping characters, many many crashes. Whenever we told it to save, we’d have to both touch nothing to make sure it didn’t crash while saving. Oh, and there was a bug meaning only the player who chose to sleep for the day would get any companion progression.
Wow 8hrs, I’ve never gotten more than 2 on a laptop
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Not to mention that you can buy the previous version for 300 € and get most of the same value (less storage, gpu, screen, battery)
You can also upgrade the storage and screen if you want.
You cannot put an OLED screen in an LCD model.
They have different internals. The screen upgrades that exist for the LCD are to swap in the anti-glare coated version, or a higher resolution.
Ah, I didn’t realise that. But I mostly use my Steamdeck docked for gaming on my TV so personally haven’t bothered looking into a screen upgrade.
It’s probably not worth the effort. It’s one of the more complex mods, and the screen with additional resolution comes with a bunch of drawbacks, and the anti-glare coating isn’t that big a deal.
Both of those are still upgrades though - they didn’t say “upgrade the screen to LED”. It’s a good callout though!
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I bought 512GB OLED and then immediately swapped the SSD to 2 Tb
gpu?
The oled version contains a different soc iirc
Also the price scales wayyyy better. Steam Deck starts at 313,65€ now.
if you have less money, buy that, get an sd card, and if you enjoy it put an ssd in later.
That’s $346 in USD, if anyone is interested.
That’s the 512gb version even. You can get the 64gb version for $296 right now, which is a great deal. Upgrading the SSD later is pretty easy too.
Jesus. That’s a great deal. Makes me consider getting one instead of a new laptop.
Not to mention you can just toss a 1tb SD card in, with no skills needed and only minimal cost difference.
Yes, accessing your data off an SD card is marginally slower than off an NVME ssd… but we’re talking, iirc, milliseconds. If it really bugs you later down the line, then you can upgrade the SSD.
You think a microSD is only marginally slower than an nvme SSD?
Found some benchmarks. Load times appear to be influenced by the CPU doing decompression. It’s not the SD being as fast as a SSD, but rather the SSD being as slow as a SD because of this. That’s… interesting.
Load times have always been bottlenecked by the CPU, so it’s not a massive surprise that the SSD is about on par with a decent SD card.
On the PS4 an SSD was faster than a HDD, but not by a massive amount. At least it was quieter though.
In the steam decks case yeah.
Yep. At some point maybe Valve will change that, but for now, it’s a great way to get a steam deck. And even if they do change/fix that later, you’re not really missing out on anything- everything will be the same speed it always was for you.
Does it have a USB port to plug in my external hd filled with games?
Usb-c port, so yes, though you may need an adapter… And a long cord.
Unless you also grab the dock, but then you also need a controller.
I’m a PC couch player, I’ve played with a controller for the last decade with my 75" TV.
I’d definitely get a dock for it.You guys are selling me big time on this.
I’ve been told (haven’t done it myself) that the ps5 controller pairs extremely well with the steam deck + dock. I would ask around though- I have an actual Steam Controller that I use, myself, but I don’t think you can buy those anymore.
Well, sometimes load times matter. In Borderlands 3 going off SD card instead of disc drive caused a minute or more of loading time when launching the game.
That’s not the cause- benchmarks have been done on the matter, as you can see slightly down the comment chain. You’ve simply attributed the slow load times to what you think is the issue.
Cheapest OLED steam deck is $549.00 (USD) while the most expensive is $649.00 (USD).
So really either way not only all those positives, but it’s also at least $50 cheaper (which you can use to buy several games on Steam…)
You will probably want to get a usb dock and video cable for at least $ 100 though, to be on par with the PS5
Why $100?
It works with any USB-C hub - I spent $15 on a hub and $5 on an HDMI cable.
Subscription for Internet access is the one that’s always baffled me. What a stupid business model. I guess devices not belonging to their buyers is not a new thing.
is it for “internet” or access to ps servers?
It was MS that started that back on the OG Xbox.
I think all the F2P ones (and a handful of others like FFXIV) are exempt from it. At least on Playstation.
It makes sense because servers are expensive to operate. The real scam is nintendo where you pay for P2P multiplayer…
They’re expensive when you’re not already building a CDN for delivery of massive files all around the world. Economies of scale quickly matter there.
They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.
Remember that Sony gets a cut from games being distributed to their platform, so online fees are just them double dipping for extra profits.
Web servers are different from game servers. You need a lot of performance and fast low latency servers to keep up with realtime game play. Webservers however dont need that and can benefit of load balancing accross multiple servers. Scale of economy helps a lot, but with game servers the cost doesnt change much because a session has to be on a single machine.
As for distribution costs, most of the cost is manufacturing and physical distribution of discs. So yeah, they are making a killing by continuing to take a a huge cut from game sales when most of their distribution is online.
At some point in my career I’ve actually designed mission critical high performance distributed server systems for a living, so I’m well aware of that.
You can still pack thousands of users per server and have very low latency as long as you use the right architecture for it (it’s mainly done with in-memory caching and load balancing) when you’re accessing gigantic datasets which far exceed the data space of a game where the actual shared data space is miniscule since all clients share a local copy of most of the dataspace - i.e. the game level they’re playing in - and even with the most insane anti-cheat logic that checks every piece of data coming in from the user side against a server-side copy of the “game level data space” it’s still but a fraction of the shared data space in equivalent situations in the corporate world, plus it tends to be easilly partitionable data (i.e. even in MMORG with a single fully open massive playing space, players only affect limited areas of the entire game space so you don’t really need to check the actions of a player against the data of all other players).
Also keep in mind that all the static (never changing or slow changing stuff) like achievements or immutable level configuration can still be served with “normal” latencies.
Further the kind LVL1 ISP that provides network access for companies like Sony servicing millions of users already has more than good enough latency in their normal service and hence Sony needs not pay extra for “low latency”.
Anyways, you do make a good and valid point, it’s just that IMHO that’s the kind of thing that pushes the running costs per-player-month from one dollar cents or less to, at most (and this is likely quite a large overestimation), a dollar per-player-month unless they only have tens of players per-server (which would be insane and they should fire their systems designers if that’s the case).
They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.
It’s the same on xbox
Both run games at 720p
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In desktop mode you can change the resolution of the connected display. It goes back to 720p if you go back to gaming mode, but you can always just launch games from the desktop if you want higher resolution for a specific game.
You can also change the resolution in gaming mode
I didn’t see it in display settings, but maybe I missed it!
IIRC they also just recently launched a new setting that allows you to permanently set the target resolution for all games (this might still only be in the beta branch though).
Previously you had to go into each game’s settings from Steam, and change the resolution there (which might be how you missed it).
If I’m playing modern games on a TV? PS5 easy. But still the pro over the deck.
I love my deck. As the handheld it’s intended to be. It’s not powerful enough for an acceptable experience running a AAA 3D game on a TV screen. You can ignore the resolution and artifacts and just generally low visual quality and poor frame rate on a small screen, because playing the games portably at all is a huge step up. You can’t ignore any part of it on a TV. It’s fine for indie games, older games, 2D stuff, etc.
But it doesn’t have the performance for a good living room experience if you’re looking to play modern AAA games. (Ignoring all their bullshit rootkits on PC that block a lot of multiplayer games out completely, which are the games you have to pay for on PS. You just can’t play most of them on Linux at all.)
Yup. As someone who hasn’t had a dedicated gaming PC in about a decade, I’ve been really happy with the PS5 + Steam Deck combo (well, plus Switch, but that thing collects dust until Nintendo releases a Mario platformer).
I recently got a laptop that’s not made for gaming specifically, but can handle them pretty well (with Proton), and that has scratched any itch I’ve had for PC games that don’t lend themselves to Deck or console (your RTS games and such).
At risk of giving away the game… I think people would be very surprised to see how cheap physical copies of PS4 and PS5 games go for when you catch them on sale.
I love my Steam deck, and bounce between how heavily I use it vs the switch* or PS5 depending on the games I’m into at the moment. But misrepresenting its utility as a modern living room PC (like the OP) doesn’t help anyone and is just going to leave people disappointed.
The PS5 is probably my smallest library (and mostly PS4 games, a lot of which were before I had a PC), but it’s definitely plenty capable and I don’t regret the purchase at all. (The controller is also the coolest non graphics addition to gaming I’ve experienced in a long time).
*The switch desperately needs a 3rd party replacement for the controllers, though, because the joycons are bad brand new.
But misrepresenting its utility as a modern living room PC doesn’t help anyone and is just going to leave people disappointed.
Did I do this?
No, the OP did.
Edited for clarity.
how cheap physical copies of PS4 and PS5 games go for when you catch them on sale.
Buy them while you can folks, sony et al is working OT to kill this option
Y’all just picky. 720 was fine 20 years ago and it’s fine now.
Black and white TV was fine 60 years ago and it’s fine now
20 years ago was pre-bluray, so the most common video media was dvd with resolution of 720 × 480 (480p). So 720p was really good 20 years ago.
That, and monitor/TV size increased a lot at the time when flat panels became a thing, so you need a higher resolution just to achieve the same pixel density you already had on a smaller screen.
Well also the change to pixel based screens from CRTs meant that you needed higher resolution for the picture to look comparitively good.
It was not. 30 years ago, it would have been very good, though, as a lot of media was still SD.
No joke, I’m tempted to buy a Steam Deck (or true Linux phone) because… It can run a local HTML/CSS/JS app on a browser with filesystem access and audio support. This is the power of having an OS that is not locked down.
Speaking of which, what would you recommend for me to run a local HTML/CSS/JS app on a browser with filesystem access and audio support? (No, Android is too locked down to meet that spec) Other required specs:
- Portable: Can fit in a pocket
- 16GB or more usable storage
- Bluetooth support
- Ideally low-cost
I have an Orange PI Pro 5 16GB on a box that smoothly runs a full blown Ubuntu Desktop version and would fit in a pocket though it’s maybe a little too thick (from memory the box it’s about 3x5x2 cm).
Total cost was about $170.
The board itself would fit a thinner box, but you might have to 3D print one.
Mind you, a N100 Mini-PC that costs the same is even more capable as a Linux Desktop, but it’s significantly larger and will definitely not fit a pocket.
You can find cheaper SBCs capable of running a Desktop Ubuntu but in my experience (with a $35 Banana Pi P2-Zero) if you go too far down the price scale Desktop Linux performance stops being smooth, even if the board is a tiny thing.
It was actually quite surprising for me recently when I found out some of these things are perfectly capable Linux Desktops.
You can probably encase a Raspberry PI with a battery and a touch screen, micro SD cards can go much higher than 16, and install Linux. Keep in mind that the Linux touch UIs aren’t really great imo, the best experience I’ve had so far is the steam deck.
Decktility maybe
Some of the points in the meme are weaker versions of the full truth:
Desktop OS and you can substitute your own.
Biggest game library and you can also side load your stuff from other stores.
It’s almost as if they’re two completely different markets
