Cool. I’ll just be over here happily playing my Steam Deck.
this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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Maybe even get Xbox gamepass on it.
Im honestly not sure why they're making a handheld Xbox after their "everything is an xbox" push. Why have just an Xbox when you can get anything else PLUS an Xbox for likely cheaper?
That’s why they’re doing this. The sleeping dragon is waking up. They’re gonna pour all of their marketing effort into killing the Steam Deck because of the threat it represents for consumer Windows.
If M$ was smart, they'd develop a version of Windows optimized for gaming. But they can't do that without implying that desktop Windows is inferior for games.
They already have the Xbox framework. I don't understand why it's so difficult to just use that for gaming and give the handheld the ability to launch a lightweight version of Windows similar to the easy way Steam OS will let you exit to Linux desktop.
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.
While I agree that the actual code base needs to be develop and augmented on the backend to make this work, that's not really what I'm saying. I'm pointing out that they already have the visual design and working template for a handheld based OS ( navigation and so on). Just that coupled with something like what they had with Windows 10 (the tablet interface for 10 was better than 11) would be fine. It could literally be an Xbox version of steam' big picture mode (because you can launch directly into it from Windows on 10). There even already exists a slimmed down version of Windows 11 to save on resource hogging.
The steam deck has been out long enough for them to have implemented this kind of thing. They've had time to design it. They've just been using that time to deliberately figure out how to shoehorn AI and telemetry and the rest into it because at the end of the day they still want to siphon up all that data.
I agree. They've had time if they cared about making this product before the Steam Deck was a success, but much like with cloud infrastructure, or search engines, or MP3 players, or mobile, or game consoles in general, they only really cared about it after someone else made a great version of what they could have been doing themselves.
The Xbox system is a windows based system optimised to run on the consoles hardware. It has been since launch. Modifying it for handhelds with the ability to navigate to a desktop environment. The addition of a desktop environment isn't so difficult that it should take three years to accomplish. They launched windows 11 4 years ago and it didn't take but a few months for them to start shoehorning AI into every crevice of it.
Asus has a product already in production that could be used for the purposes of test bench testing and development. The original ROG Ally is even around the same price point as a steam deck.
So all in all the only two excuses MS has are that they are bad at understanding trends and getting in on the ground floor, and they are bad at optimising windows specifically because that goes against their business plan to gather user data and weaponize that data against their competitors.
All.in all we don't have an Xbox handheld at this point because they're greedy and fail to act on trend analysis.
They're probably building off Windows RT (the locked down variant designed for ARM tablets).
If they were smart they'd imitate some of how SteamOS runs games in a modified WinRT environment - TLDR do NOT start up the entire Win32 runtime and desktop environment by default, don't run stuff like printer services and whatnot, just run a simplified sandbox and window manager with just the APIs needed to run the games similar to Proton. Then let the user switch to desktop mode as needed, but don't run it when gaming.
I’m guessing this is basically how the Xbox works already.
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
That is literally what they’re doing.
And failing, apparently
Eh.. No
Without implying that desktop Windows wasn't made with hardware that has neither a keyboard or a mouse in mind? That it wasn't made to be used on a 7" screen? Sure.
Only in the Linux fanatics minds does it implies that desktop Windows is inferior for games.
It's not as if people are using the Steam Deck in desktop mode when they want to play games either and the experience on Steam OS in desktop mode if you don't connect at least a keyboard is pretty shit as well, so I guess that the fact that by default it boots in Steam mode must be a proof that Linux is inferior for games if we follow your logic.
Linux fanatics
I'd rather be a fanatic than a revenue stream with Stockholm syndrome.
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.
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.
At this rate they should brand it as a Zune device.
They would instantly have my attention. The Zune was dope.
It's their own fault they couldn't see a demand for handheld gaming.
This is how Microsoft has operated since day 1:
- they let Dartmouth take the lead with Dartmouth BASIC and followed up with Altair BASIC (Microsoft’s very first product)
- they let Gary Kildall take the lead with CP/M and followed up with DOS
- they let WordPerfect take the lead and followed up with Word
- they let VisiCalc and Lotus 123 take the lead and followed up with Excel
- they let Apple take the lead on GUI with the Mac and followed up with Windows
- they let Netscape take the lead and followed up with IE
- they let Sony take the lead with PlayStation and followed up with Xbox
- they let Apple take the lead with iPad and followed up with Surface
- now they’re letting Valve take the lead with SteamDeck and following up with their own handheld
"Let" is that the wrong word. Microsoft was setup specifically to make BASIC for the Altair. DOS they stumbled into because CP/M dropped the ball. Every other product, they've been chasing new markets that they didn't think of being in.
I'm critical about Xbox handheld/portable because it was so obvious that that's where the demand would come from.
However, they've been better at monetizing their other software and services better than anyone else though.
My point here is that none of these cases feature Microsoft inventing a brand new product and trying to market it for the first time. Their whole strategy from the very beginning was to look for existing products with existing markets and try to conquer them. They even had a name for a variant of this strategy (targeted at open standards) which the US DoJ famously discovered during the antitrust trial:
When you start from Windows NT and vibe code for 31 years.
Why does this thing look like it fell into a ravine.
God Microsoft is just taking so many L's. How can they make so much money and be so bad at managing Xbox?