That depends a lot on what you’re playing and what your expectations are. I use my Ally to play older games and indies and I feel like it’s great for that. AAA experiences I play on my Xbox Series X.

I have a friend who’s had every handheld and he says they all suck, but he’s expecting to play stuff like COD at high settings and 60fps. That’s just not realistic.

But again I’m coming from growing up with gameboys and Nintendo DS so I don’t have the expectations that someone who grew up in the HD generation might have.

I’m guessing this is basically how the Xbox works already.

To be fair, every company was sure handhelds would die and mobile games would take over everything. Then the Switch happened.

Linux fanatics

I'd rather be a fanatic than a revenue stream with Stockholm syndrome.

I'm a gameboy era dude, I don't have that high expectations from a portable console.
To this day I managed to play to most AAA game I throwed at the Deck at an OK quality (low to medium) with good fps (40-45 fps).
But E33 just didn't want to, and some area looked a lot different than on my 5 year old computer.
The manor, as an example, looks washed out and overexposed, almost white and grey, while on the computer it looked oldish, but acceptable. And I was on low settings on the computer . So either it is currently bugged, or there is an hidden "very low" setting specially made for the Deck.

And how many years since the Switch? Even the Steam Deck was an open secret for years.

We're talking about people using a Steam Deck instead so people that are a revenue stream with Stockholm syndrome for yet another billionaire, just one that privately owns his company instead of it being publically traded.

Much as I hate Nintendo now, their contribution to gaming can't be denied. First they revived it from the crash in 1983, then they showed that there's a market for a hybrid console/handheld device, paving the way for PC handhelds.

So far as I can think, wasn't the only handheld that failed the Playstation Vita? And that had very visible reasons for the failure - designing itself around an obtuse storage medium, and requiring first-party memory cards. Even with those drawbacks and with no first-party support, it had a tremendous following.

It honestly could still be a worthwhile device to chain off of, since none of the current offerings fit in a pants pocket.

I love the Vita, and you're right, you can hack it to accept SD Cards, use native PSP/PS1 emulation in any game and a lot of homebrew ports.

PS: If you're willing to get third party PC Handhelds, the Ayaneo Air 1S is the closest thing the Vita form factor I know. 5.5" OLED screen, but the bezel is thicker and it has longer grips. It's a 2023 device, so I'm interested to know what they'll do with the next line of AMD chips

There are a lot of edge cases. You have to handle external launchers, external error prompts; basically anything that requires you to Alt+Tab. One of the things Valve did a decade ago was the stuff that got rolled into GameScope that ensures that they never lose focus of the game window. Even with the resources to transform Windows this way, it will still take time.

It's not so much Win32 though on Xbox, the biggest similarity is the x86 CPU and the shared kernel and some security stuff

Edit: forgot the obvious, DirectX

I don't know where your preferences lie, but by the numbers, far more games are coming in under the Steam Deck specifications in terms of system requirements than there are games that are stretching them or exceeding them. Very few companies can afford to make a game that runs poorly on it. If we look at the top 12 highest-reviewing games on OpenCritic for 2025 so far, I think only 1 of them (Monster Hunter Wilds) doesn't meet the spec, and at least 3 or 4 of them are 2D with a retro aesthetic. All that to say, I think the horsepower ought to be enough for most people for a very long time, barring a minimal number of games.

I don't know how much of that was needing to prove that the market existed rather than the simultaneous development of performant and power efficient x64 APUs suitable for handheld gaming PCs. The 3DS was plenty successful even at the time, but handheld-only games had a reputation for being the B game to the home consoles' A game. It was a pretty natural conclusion for Nintendo, when their handheld was successful and their home console was not, to combine the two, using the same tech found in cell phones, no less.

Bet that linux vs windows performance video did it in. The exec who thinks linux desktop doesn't even exist saw this and immediately shat their pants in rage.

There's a massive catalog of 3ds exclusives and those drove the market, not the adaptations or ports. The latter were the minority and not even the most popular titles.

Not an adaptation or port, but the Link Between Worlds compared to the console's Breath of the Wild. Say what you will about the subjective quality of each of those games, but the market at large would prefer Breath of the Wild. Plus Sony's catalog had this problem even more visibly on Vita.

It’s a great device once you get windows off it; which is a chore. It’s unusable with Windows.

4.26 million copies sold, 17 best game awards and critical acclaim as the fourth best game for the 3DS disagree. The game also predates Breath of the wild by four years. I don't know anyone else who compares the two directly. The LoZ games had always, until the Switch, been defined as existing in two distinct lines, the handheld games and the console games. I was thinking more of games like Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater, Ocarina of Time, Splinter Cell, The Sims, or Resident Evil Revelations who were more direct ports. And that's even with a caveat, as RER was released for 3DS first then ported to consoles, and other ports were purpose made remakes that conserved the gameplay loop but were otherwise heavily adapted.

The 3DS has more that 1800 games, and most of them are exclusives.

It’s most definitely not. The ROG Crate app is pretty good. And if you spend a few minutes setting up shortcuts, everything becomes a whole lot easier. But I basically never touch the windows layer on my ally anyways.