cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/3922769
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/linustechtips by /u/RevolutionaryAd8204 on 2024-09-14 15:50:43+00:00.
Eventually, Sony will stop supporting the PS5 and it’ll be a brick. If Valve ever stops supporting the Steamdeck, it’ll keep running.
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.
Ex Machina the movie or the 1984 “game”? That’s before Mario was even a thing.
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.
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.
