bucked the trend and rose despite all the bad news. This is undoubtedly a script that belongs to the steam deck. Steam Deck’s impressive performance of dominating the Steam sales rankings for 21 weeks proves that even though mobile games have become popular around the world, the group of handheld gamers will always exist. Subsequently, related products from major manufacturers such as ASUS's rog handheld console, Sony's ps portal, MSI's claw handheld console, and Lenovo's legion go came one after another, as well as brands such as gpd and ayaneo that have long been focused on this field. , the field of game handheld consoles seems to have suddenly returned to 20 years ago, that is, the fiery era when Nintendo nds and Sony psp were competing.
With the popularity of the handheld market, more and more people want to get a piece of the pie. Recently, a dedicated handheld system called playtron os was officially released, and it is expected that ayaneo will launch products equipped with playtron os at the end of this year. It is reported that playtron os was launched by playtron founded by former cyanogen (well-known third-party Android rom) founder kirt mcmaster. Like steamos, playtron os is also based on Linux and supports both x86 and arm platforms.
Currently, there is no operating system similar to Android in the handheld market. x86 handheld consoles represented by rog handheld consoles basically use Microsoft's Windows 11 system directly. However, for the convenience of players, they usually design a dedicated game center, such as the Ultron Game Intelligent Control Center and Rescue of rog handheld consoles. Or the legion space of legion go.
The reason why Lenovo and ROG chose this strategy is also very simple. After all, after removing the tile elements and even the tablet mode, Windows 11 leaves people with the impression of being more like a pure desktop product.
The current problem of Android handheld devices is that their weak performance prevents them from being distinguished from smartphones. Didn’t you see, the Logitech g cloud gaming handheld console jointly built by Tencent and Logitech now has no sound. And the competitors of Android handheld consoles are not actually x86 handheld consoles, but Android phones and tablets. Especially because the Android ecosystem has been catalyzed by the concept of gaming phones, a prosperous peripheral market has been born before, and in various games With the support of peripherals, mobile phones and tablets can also obtain a gaming experience comparable to that of handheld devices.
The problem with Windows 11 for handheld consoles is that it is not optimized for mobile devices, and such devices need to be careful about energy consumption. After all, players cannot find sockets at all times. As a result, playtron os, a Linux-based handheld operating system, has room for survival. If playtron os can really prove itself, it will most likely not lack collaborators and no one will pay for it.
handheld console is an intermediate device. It has portability advantages over game consoles and PCs, and performance and control advantages over smartphones. But omnipotence often means mediocrity. After all, if you want to pursue a more extreme gaming experience, players will usually choose PC or game console. If you want to pursue a gaming experience anytime, anywhere, smartphones will obviously be a better choice.
So, who is buying a handheld console? Of course they are sentimental parties or enthusiast players, and the characteristics of these groups are that they have money and are willing to pay for gaming experience.
The question now is, can playtron os bring a satisfying gaming experience to players? In fact, using Linux to play games is not a false proposition. In addition to making sure that games natively support Linux during the development stage, it can actually play most Windows games.
In fact, the wine project of the Linux community is the "hero behind the scenes" that achieves all this. It provides a compatibility layer so that Linux can install and run Windows programs, and Wine does not imitate the logic of Windows like an emulator, but will Windows API calls are converted into POSIX calls.
But using wine to run Windows programs is not without cost. Since the Windows API is not completely public, programs transplanted through Wine often do not perform as well under Linux as under Windows, or many functions are lost for transplantation.
The person who really made it possible for Linux to play Windows games normally is Valve. Steam launched the proton plan based on wine.In addition, Valve also sponsored vkd3d, which was translated from dx12 to vulkan, and dxvk, which was translated from dx9 to dx11 to vulkan.
So it can almost be said that Valve has single-handedly greatly improved the gaming experience on Linux. The only problem is that proton requires steam support, which means that players who buy games on the epic game store or even other platforms cannot enjoy this feature. convenient. The biggest selling point of playtron os is that games purchased from the epic game store can also run smoothly on the handheld console. However, does playtron really have the appeal of steam?
steam's strong position in the field of digital game distribution allows Valve to enable a number of game developers to carry out exclusive optimization for steamos. This is why the steam deck is equipped with a customized APU with a zen2+rdna2 architecture. Its performance can only be compared to the AMD Ryzen 4000 series apu, but the gaming experience it provides is not inferior.
There is no doubt that Playtron’s status in the gaming industry cannot be compared to Steam, and even Steam’s proton has not covered 100% of the Stean content library until now.
In fact, proton is similar to Huawei's Hongmeng ecosystem in a sense. Currently, they are just negotiating with third-party developers one by one, trying to gradually let developers support proton/Hongmeng in their products. Obviously, if playtron does not have a market position like steam, it will lead to a result. The upper limit of playtron os will always be lower than that of steamos, and the latter itself is not closed. Therefore, it may be difficult for Playtron OS to replicate the story of Android coming to the fore and surpassing iOS.
Although it is difficult to replace steamos, it can replace the current position of windows 11 in the handheld market. It is estimated that there will not be a big problem. After all, Windows 11 can be said to be the culprit for the poor battery life of many x86 handheld consoles, so relevant hardware manufacturers have some motivation to try new operating systems.
[The pictures in this article are from the Internet]
