Long title. A lot to unpack this morning. But we’ll try to move quickly. I’ve been molting. As a lot of you know over the past couple of weeks I’ve been transitioning to only playing on PC, after 20 years of playing on 3 or more platforms, and twice as much time gaming in general. Tonight will be the second or third episode of the Enough 2 Keep Going podcast that I’ve recorded since this process started. Grooming the agenda this AM, I noticed that we didn’t have the most recent State of Play down for discussion. I was about to be ok with that. The new show format is supposed to be the games we’ve been playing as a priority, and any news associated with those games as a secondary matter. And I haven’t played anything associated with the PlayStation brand this past week. In the transition, I got rid of my XBox Series S, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 5. And I’d taken a break from SIE’s God of War on PC. I scanned over the State of Play, and once again considered how my decision was going to cut me off from the PlayStation ecosystem. I had settled on this path forward, but a recent conversation with a friend had given me cause to once again consider whether or not I was going to miss the PlayStation exclusives.
I’ve never been a big SIE exclsuives fan. For the most part, I can take them or leave them. My other gaming interests have always made it difficult to fit those games in. That being said, over the past few years, I’d had immense fun playing the Uncharted franchise installments, Miles Morales, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Death Stranding. And the PS4 was my Destiny 2 main for a very long time. Maybe I should do PlayStation Now? Lemme come back to that.
The other big swirl in the news cycle that has impacted me in recent weeks is the drop of the Steam Deck. I am anxiously in the queue awaiting my notice to buy. Good chance I could be skull and bones by the time it comes, but I’m still anxious. Yet, I look at some of the wildly hyperbolic reviews of late with a heap of side-eye. The Steam Deck is a mobile, portable, cozy-couch kind of value proposition. I look forward to playing mine docked, yes (I basically only ever played my Switch in handheld mode when I was on travel), but when it is, it will decidely be the bottom of the heap of any rig in operation in my studio. Even lower than my dedicated streaming PCs. As I’ve been running The Witch Queen expansion this past week, and benching my new builds as I see them pulling 160 frames on an HDR 10-bit display, and my oldest, least powerful gaming rig pulling 120, I know that such performance will never be present on the Steam Deck (of course as of now, you’re heavily discouraged from even trying to play Destiny 2 on the Steam Deck anyway, but you get my drift).
And when there is a SKU that is, there will be even more powerful hardware available on Desktop. The Steam Deck has the potential to meet its specific use-case better than anything in recent history, but the comparisons to desktop power are kind of ludicrous. For me, there is no way that a 7 inch OLED will ever rank as being “better” than one of my 27″ curved IPS 1440p 144Hz HDR displays. Again, it will meet its use-case as a couch-device, but it willl never exceed the desktop in other areas. And so those who embrace power over portability will never embrace it as the “best”. Better in mobile situations, better in bed, better on the couch, better on travel, sure. But let’s stop the flat-earther takes on where it sits in comparison to desktop power.
The Steam Deck is a decidely casual PC gaming value-proposition, where someone wants it for scenarios where they can’t use a desktop, or for the crowd of PC gamers for whom “good enough” is just that. Again. Casuals. I know that that latter category of PC gamers is growing, led by an army of livestreamers who had to buy PCs for streaming because you can only do so much production quality streaming directly from a console; and then once there, flipped over to be a PC gamer out of convenience, and now run out to buy 3080s and 3090s so they can play Fall Guys and PUBG. That and other influences are creating an additional demographic of PC gamers out of a knock-on effect. So there are more and more people in the PC gaming space who don’t build their own rigs, and will be ok getting by on low-power compute on a heavily optimized operating platform because their performance demands are not high. And as an alternative to lugging a 10 pound package of gaming laptop + power supply brick, the Deck is a viable alternative. In fact, I am sure it will be an alternative to my current PC gaming travel solution, Google Stadia.
Once I do get my hands on the Steam Deck, I expect to end that subscription. A subscription that has done what I needed it to do because, as a Network Engineer in a previous life, I understand packet-loss, latency, and jitter, and have always used Stadia under conditions where its delivery to me is optimized. And that has prevented me from having to lug the aforementioned 10 pound kit.
When that happens, it frees up room in my subscription space for PlayStation Now. And so I spent time after grooming the agenda this morning to litmus test whether or not the service would be a fit for my requirements. There’s a host of technical reasons why it wouldn’t be, in its present state. But the first litmus test I wanted to run was for content. I’ll be set for Uncharted for bit once the PC version of the 4 + Lost Legacy Remaster drops for PC. But none of the other titles I mentioned earlier are available on PS Now. Spider-Man I think is, which I guess means the official list of PS Now titles isn’t up-to-date? I couldn’t find it this morning under Spider-Man or Marvel’s Spider-Man. And it would need to include Miles to secure my interest. Ghosts is not and Death Stranding is not.
Sony’s approach to its streaming service is weird on the landscape of streaming media. Streaming media is a very specific business model, so don’t take umbrage to my perspective based on the way the gamer thinks about it, because it’s not the same value-proposition that streaming and cloud content have established themselves as across the entertainment lansdscape. In every other strategic approach to streaming delivery, recency is key. And the value of delivering things so far beyond day-and-date that they are only nostalgia plays or collector plays is a weak hand. I know that rumblings and rumors of Spartacus are likely to change that outlook. They’ll need to in order to encourage me to renew my relationship with PlayStation again anytime soon.
Rounding Off Infinity 