The Game Awards 2025 Edition -June 6- 10pm BST

[Lenny Solidus]

https://www.youtube.com/live/Zu2z5M4gmn ... DYmKzdaIg9

[Alan]

https://www.dexerto.com/call-of-duty/mw ... w-2423107/

What a bunch of dobbers!

[Lenny Solidus]

https://www.youtube.com/live/-Hr6Q2hln_ ... dSRSPm5Eb7

[Animalmother]

So they are releasing a handheld after all. Supports Steam and GoG games as well.

[Alan]

This the Xbox thing? Just an Ally innit?

[Animalmother]

I gave up watching midway through, some interesting looking games but an awful lot of trash as well. Pretty much everything they showed is also going to he on the PS5.

[Raid]

I dunno, I think 90% of it looked like good stuff, but there were only a handful that I was interested in myself. Clockwork Revolution was the standout I think, it was very reminiscent of Bioshock Infinite, (which was my favourite from that series) but being set in a steampunk London. Ninja Gaiden 4 is something I'll certainly try via Game Pass, though I only ever really enjoyed the first of the XBox series. I'm intrigued by There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, and At Fate's End hit a lot of my aesthetic tastes but whether I like how it plays remains to be seen.

I've seen a lot of speculation that the ROG Ally is going to cost *a lot*. I think it's a good concept - the one thing that the Steam Deck has missed is access to the Game Pass library after all (games you don't have to pay separately for means trying more stuff in my experience), but you have to wonder whether buying anything with a mobile version of Windows on is a good idea.

[Alan]

You can install Steam OS on it so that’s no big thing. Windows still has a lot of problems with suspend so just going into standby and firing it back up later can drain the crap out of your battery and might have crashed the game anyway. I mean you could install windows on the steam deck and play gamepass games too. Bizarrely enough, Steam OS, even using its translation layer to play windows games, gets better performance than windows (handhelds and desktops) which just shows the bloatware that windows is these days.

It’ll be interesting if MS subsidies the price of their branded one

[Raid]

I think if Microsoft were going to subsidise the new one (which I agree is a possibility), there'd have to be a way of locking it down into their own ecosystems. There's no point in them paying Asus a whole load of money for hardware if people immediately install Steam OS and never buy a single Microsoft game.

[Alan]

They could buy Forza on Steam!

[Wrathbone]

The biggest implication from the handheld is that it will let you play your Xbox library on Windows, which is a soft confirmation of the long held rumour. Forget the handheld, if MS are going to let me play my Xbox games (digital purchases, of course) on PC then that’s a big win.

It does raise some compatibility questions, which makes me wonder if for older titles or those not already on PC, will they run in a virtual Xbox wrapper or similar?

[Alan]

Their videos make it sound, to folk not in the know (console folk) that this plays Xbox games. Some people are going to be pissed when they buy it and find it’s only the pc games and not their library of console Xbox titles.

[Mantis]

I think they mentioned on the stream that they're also bringing the Cloud gaming system to it, so Xbox games are still available on it albeit not natively. I think your own Xbox account full game purchases carry over to the Cloud library too so if you own one that's available for streaming you can play it.

[Alan]

Yeah but streaming is mostly garbage and you can do that on your phone with a better screen. It just feels very disingenuous to be touting it as a portable XBox. Seems like they have done work on the software side, minimising windows footprint so it would be cool if they brought that to the desktop.

[DjchunKfunK]

Reading reports on the handheld it sounds like Microsoft have done a lot of work on making the version of Windows better with an Xbox front-end you can load into which reduces a lot of the Windows footprint when you are in it. The Xbox game stuff means that anything that is any game you own that is a Play Anywhere title will be available on the system. You can find a full list of these titles at this here.