Well, this one ended up being a bit more stream of consciousness than I was expecting, but I’m going to just publish this as-is.

The Steam Deck is an interesting piece of hardware, and while I had some initial worries about how Valve was going to pull the project off after the complete bomb that the Steam Machines ended up being, I feel that the Deck has really managed to shine a very bright– painfully bright– light into some major problems that Microsoft seems to have left lying for quite a long time.

I’m going to preface this by saying that the Deck is by no means perfect; there are major problems with the official dock, VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) support, framerate limiting, and sometimes even problems with controller input related to OS updates. That is what makes this all the worse for Microsoft, in fact. The fact that a platform that could still be considered to be somewhat unstable and in a long-term beta is still swiping and eating Microsoft’s lunch wholesale is incredibly damning.

So, what’s going on with Windows that’s such a big issue? The first is Microsoft’s inability to get quality control back under control. Each patch in the last few years has resulted in system administrators across the planet wondering, “Will this be the month that Microsoft breaks something critical for my home or business again?”

Clearly Microsoft has not been monitoring their official feedback system: many of these breaking patches have been easily and clearly visible through the Insider Program’s public betas, with responses coming in to mention such things as the OS trashing the user’s entire user folder if it’s not in the default location, but Microsoft continued to put the patch out officially and a large number of people were thus burned. That hasn’t been the only time this has happened in recent years, either.

While Microsoft seems intent on saving costs as much as possible by outsourcing their QA to the general public, that won’t help if you’re not paying attention to what they’re saying and actually FIXING the bugs.

Another major issue is resource management. Handhelds are the hot new item, and they demonstrate the huge gap in Microsoft’s coverage. For a fair comparison, you can put SteamOS 3 (which is a Linux-based OS) side by side with Windows on the exact same hardware and notice a few things right off the bat.

The first is usability. MS was caught flat-footed by this new trend, and while Windows does support controllers for input, there’s not really a good dedicated UI for small screens (or 20’ away televisions, for that matter) and as you’d expect the usability of Windows on these handhelds is awful.

The second point of pain is services. Microsoft, by default, keeps a lot of tiny system services running at all times. While it may be possible to trim a large chunk of this down manually, it’s going to be difficult at best to get it down to the kind of free resources you can with a tuned Linux install like SteamOS.

This, of course, also leads to battery life problems. SteamOS does the very best it can with the battery life situation, but I don’t believe anyone out there would consider the battery life on the Steam Deck to be anything better than “acceptable,” certainly not “great.”

That particular point hits on a tangential subject I’d like to briefly comment on as well. Microsoft doesn’t have a dedicated handheld as of yet, and they’re relying on third parties such as Lenovo, Asus, and Acer, to put out products that compete with the Steam Deck. Unfortunately, most of these third parties seem to feel that the way to compete with the Deck is to be more powerful, thus crippling battery life even further and putting out insane amounts of heat.

I will admit that I was concerned about the system specs on the Deck at first, but came to believe that Valve had found the sweet spot between performance and not crippling the battery life entirely. This is the point that I believe the third party competitors have chosen to actively ignore; it’s nigh-impossible that they don’t know or understand the balance, and more likely they simply don’t think they can win that fight with Windows on their hardware.

While I won’t say that my time with the Deck has been flawless, I can definitely say that the experience has been smoother than the one I’ve had running Windows on a desktop or laptop during the same time frame.

I have to wonder what the future holds for Microsoft. They’ve publicly said on multiple occasions now that they want to get a handheld out. If you asked me two years ago, I’d have said, “Make it part of the Xbox ecosystem, playing Xbox Series and 360 backwards compatible games!” without reservation. In 2024, watching Microsoft bleed customer support towards Sony, it’s a much harder call to make. I’m not a fan of exclusives, but if you have two platforms that are roughly the same and one has a core of exclusives and the other has very few, you can easily see what people are going to buy into.

If they want to make it a full Windows-based handheld (keep in mind the Xbox One and Series consoles all run a cut-down custom build of Windows) they’re going to seriously need to figure out how to trim down a basic install and they’re desperately going to need to get a better handheld/TV interface going– possibly by porting the Xbox Series UI back for a handheld. Just as importantly, they’re going to need to also fix the rampant problems with quality control, as breaking a console-style experience with bad patches is going to rapidly push players away from the product.

Can Microsoft even pull this off? I’m honestly skeptical at this point.

I feel like Microsoft is about to kill off the Xbox brand in the near future. I hope I’m wrong, but my instincts are screaming that MS’s next big move will be to change Xbox to a specification that they can farm out to HP, Dell, Lenovo, and so forth, so that they can focus on Game Pass. If that ends up being the case, I don’t have a lot of faith that HP et al. will be able to make a product that doesn’t cut corners in the sort of way that they’re always doing with their desktop and laptop hardware.

I really hope I’m wrong on this, because Sony and Nintendo need a certain level of competition to keep them honest. Any time Sony or Microsoft have been in any kind of major lead, they’ve gotten complacent and started screwing their customers over. Only when things are truly competitive has there ever been any honesty.

Who knows, maybe there won’t even be a next generation of consoles out of either Sony or Microsoft, and they’ll move to publishing on PC. That seems unlikely, but the market is really unstable and even post-COVID-supply-issues the sales numbers out of either has been less than successful.

Nintendo will continue to do what they do, for better AND for worse. That’s a whole tangent for a different article. Sony and MS, on the other hand, there’s a lot of room for maneuvering. I guess the next few years will be rather interesting; the rumblings of Sony putting out a mid-cycle upgraded PS5 Pro are increasingly loud. I don’t think Microsoft will do a mid-cycle refresh this time.

COVID really made a mess of supply and demand, and that really hurt the hardware market. I don’t think the shockwaves from that have completely dissipated. That certainly isn’t helping the numbers..

I guess it all boils down to “I don’t have faith in Microsoft’s ability to turn things around so quickly or easily, so there may not be an Xbox next generation and Windows-based handhelds are going to continue to lose to Valve’s Deck and successors despite Valve putting out buggy updates themselves.”

— Firehawke