Traditional consoles are retro handhelds, not the future

You might be hard pressed to think of a recent week without the anti-consumer practices of major video game companies like PlayStation and Xbox making headlines. Mass layoffs, studio closings, obscene price hikes, the death of physical media; The list goes on.

The driving force behind all these corporate decisions is an obsession with seeing numbers add up on spreadsheets to please executive boards. Not to promote video games as art, but to appease shareholders who are deeply invested in the financial success of the game industry, but no Invest in those who make it happen. Parasites, leeches, any of the many descriptive names I should not print; People who fear because they have billions in profits Just not enough And never will.

The really extreme thing is that logically, these decisions will have the opposite effect. Very few people are going to buy a thousand-dollar-plus PlayStation 6, especially when they haven't felt the value from the current generation. The Xbox is dying a loud and painful death because it got too big to buy activation Call of Duty and has launched the biggest campaign of self-sabotage in video game history. However, it still pursues unrealistic goals, such as one billion users per day.

Retro handhelds are closing the gap on consoles

Amidst all this, a relatively niche corner of the games market has seen significant growth, to the point where it has now broached the mainstream. Handheld consoles from China that were once marketed as retro emulation machines are now being talked about in conversations with the likes of Steam Deck and Xbox ROG Companion.

Leading these are companies like Ayn, Retroid, and Ayaneo, whose offerings keep getting more powerful with each new reveal. Where once these devices were used to play SNES, Game Boy, and PS1 games, they are now much more capable. This is mainly due to the pairing of Snapdragon's Gen 8 and Elite systems-on-chips (SoCs) and Google's Android platform, commonly found in flagship mobile phones, powering handhelds such as the Ayn Thor, Retroid Pocket 6, and Ayaneo Pocket series.

These high-end devices are not cheap. The Ayn Thor currently retails for between $259 for the Lite model and $579 for the Max model with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD. Ayaneo's prices are famously inflated, along with its Pocket DS getting started for $579. They are also not immune to the RAMpocalypse, with several price increases in recent months. But apparently, they're still looking good price than traditional consoles.

A big reason for this is that they're relatively open-source platforms, with a cottage industry of app developers creating tools for everything from PC game emulation to GameNative and GameHub to PlayStation cloud streaming that don't require buying a PS5.

Why spend grand on a console when you can subscribe to PS Plus for a month and play on a machine that costs half as much? Throw in things like RetroAchievements and frontends like ES-DE, RetroHrai, or Cocoon, and you can have a similar console experience, with more platforms covered for less money.

Ownership is becoming one of the defining themes of this generation

The major elephant in the room is piracy. Emulators require ROMs, digital copies are originally made of physical games, and often these are obtained from illegal sources. But with gaming becoming increasingly prohibitive for the average player, the rise in ownership of these handhelds is no accident – ​​and could even be seen as a protest.

A quick look at the many subreddits that have popped up around the handheld hobby shows more questions about “secret console” emulation — code for the Nintendo Switch — and GameNative or GameHub compatibility than asking about old Amiga or arcade games. People now use these devices not only to recall or preserve old games, but to actively replace current consoles.

It's easy to understand why. More than once this week, I've seen social media content that questions the illegality of piracy, and it's directly tied to game ownership. We no longer own the games we spent a lot of money on, and companies are reminding us of that in their policies. The sentiment seems to be that if we no longer own the games we purchase, then piracy cannot be considered theft.

Handheld manufacturers no doubt see this and must be rubbing their hands in glee. They rely on the FOMO that a new, more powerful console offers to keep their business going, given the tendency of hobbyists to collect these devices like candy. And with more powerful handhelds, more developers are emerging to work on cracking new consoles for emulation.

If publishers can revoke access to games that we spend a lot of money on at any time and for any reason, then this will encourage people to lean more towards alternative methods of purchase. It will be interesting to see where the market goes from here, both from a hardware perspective and given the likes of Sony, Microsoft, and others, weak support from gamers.

brand

Sony

Original release date

November 12, 2020

Original MSRP (USD)

$499, €499, £449, ¥49,980 (base) // $399, €399, £359, ¥39,980 (digital),

operating system

Orbis OS

processor

Custom 8-core AMD Zen 2

resolve

720p – 8K