Sony PlayStation 5 PS5

I traded in my Xbox series x last year after they jacked the cost of their subscriptions to get a PS5(my first Sony console in my life). With all the dumb stuff Sony is doing I was starting to wonder if I made the wrong choice, but this just reassured me. I use cloud gaming a bunch, way more than 15 hours a month because I can’t always be in front of the TV.

My PS5 can do 4k/120 hz with VRR support, not sure about the others.

Why would it be strange that there are steam decks that sit unused ? I have a switch and a PS 5 that go untouched for months (even with a 4 year old who I occasionally let play some games). I think most people in my friend group are similar in that they have some gaming gear but rarely the time to use it. Still nice to have once you do.

> PS5 did not have any novel approach that was consequently adopted by others DualSense haptics are terrific, though the Switch kind of did them first with the Joy-Cons. I'd say haptics and adaptive triggers are two features that should become standard. Once you have them you never want to go back. PS5's fast SSD was a bit of a game changer in terms of load time and texture streaming, and everyone except Nintendo has gone for fast m.2/nvme storage. PS5 also finally delivered the full remote play experience that PS3 and PS4 had teased but not completed. Original PS5 also had superior thermals vs. PS4 pro, while PS5 pro does solid 4K gaming while costing less than most game PCs (and is still quieter than PS4 pro.) Fast loading, solid remote play, solid 4K, low-ish noise are all things I don't want to give up in any console or game PC. My favorite PS5 feature however is fast game updates (vs. PS4's interminable "copying" stage.) Switch and Switch 2 also seem to have fairly fast game updates, but slower flash storage.

> IMHO PC gaming and Nintendo have relatively little overlap (e.g. compared to PS and Xbox at least). That was true back in the Wii era, because there was nothing remarkable about the Wii apart from its input method. It was "just another home console" to most developers, so why bother going through the effort to port their games from more powerful consoles down to the Wii, where they will just look bad, run poorly, and have weird controls? With the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo found huge success in third party titles because everyone who made a game was enthusiastic about being able to play their game portably, and the Switch made that possible with hardware that was architecturally similar to other consoles and PCs (at least by comparison to previous handheld gaming consoles), which made porting feasible without a complete rewrite. In my opinion, basically the only console games that aren't available on Switch at this point are the very most recent crop of high-end games, which the Switch is too old to run, as well as certain exclusives. If the Switch were still able to handle all the third party ports, then I don't even know if Nintendo would be interested in a Switch 2, but they do seem to care about the decent chunk of money they're making from third party games. The overlap with PC is the same as the overlap between PC and other consoles... which is quite a lot, but doesn't include certain genres like RTSes. They've tried bringing Starcraft to console before, and that was…

On PC you have your choice of marketplaces so it's somewhat less of an issue. On console you're locked into just the one marketplace with digital-only consoles, so if Sony wants to charge $100 for a game then that's the price. Once you've paid the $100 it's also tied to your account which is not necessarily always guaranteed to exist or be accessible, and is non-transferable. Whereas with a disk you can pay substantially less due to your choice of competitive retailers (in my region Space Marine 2 is $79 at some retailers or $109 from Sony), buy secondhand for older titles (most of my library is secondhand), and resell or trade-in games when you're finished with them. And of course it's not tied to an ephemeral account, so you will always have access to the titles you've purchased. Also for my use case, my PS5 doubles as a Blu-Ray player which is worth a good $100-200 just by itself.

I find myself slightly annoyed that I always turn to my PS5 - as it has the better catalogue and people I want to play with on it - than my Xbox, since the Xbox controller is frankly nicer on my old ass hands.

I love my PS5. I can game, not do ANY sysadmin, play most* backwards compatible games, and generally treat it like furniture Rather than a delicate hardware Device. * - Sony psvr 1 games cannot be played on a PSVR2, And developers are required to patch them, or simply abandon them. No automatic adaptation is available. Psvr1 is a hassle to use compared to psvr 2. It's a disappointing choice.

> Get a PC and do whatever you want on it. the PS5 at its launch price was best game PC price/performance, with super fast storage, keyboard and mouse support and more but the keyboard & mouse support is locked by DEVs and only a handful titles support it. a very limited 3rd party app store it could have been the steam box on steriods, alas not so. at end of the day, buying a PS5 allows you to do with your hardware what you want, be it play games on your console or create a super computer cluster with your PS3 consoles running linux.

The Switch is genuinely one of the last pieces of hardware I was really excited about, and I can't say that about much anymore. It's extremely well put together, I've repaired mine a number of times with no issues (honestly opening anything made in Japan is a joy, the engineering is so good) and the specs leave a lot to be desired, which is unfortunate, but at the same time, you wouldn't know it while using it. The XBox is such a curmudgeonly slow experience to use, everything in the menus takes forever to load, the dash jerks and lags, and it's just like... this machine can run Halo Infinite, why does it struggle so damn hard with just... boxes and jpegs? The Switch has a similar issue occasionally in the store application, but outside of that, settings are snappy, updates are practically instant, it turns on and off so quickly. It's what consoles are supposed to be. And honestly in this same vein, the PS5 is also bloody impressive, but that impressiveness came with an impressive price too. The Switch costing as little as it did and still holding it's own is so cool.

Why run Windows at that point? I'm a hybrid person. I run Linux for my work and dev OS and Windows for gaming and day to day shenanigans. If you're just going to strip Windows down to this weird broken minimal thing tho why not just use Linux full time and get a PS5/Xbox for the AAA games you can't run under Linux. I dont really get the point of the effort people go through trying to make Microsoft products something they're not.