Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Let's first come to a conclusion: with the exception of Steam Deck, the Windows handset is more or less a bit of IQ tax.

If we want to go back to the birth history of game handsets, we need to pull the timeline back to 1976. The Mattel Electronics Handheld Games series of products developed by Mattel is the first handheld ancestor to apply LED in electronic games.

Since the birth of the handset, the handset has occupied a place in the era of PC and game console by virtue of its portability and unique game experience.

I remember that the price was 1000 yuan at that time, and it was the source of every boy's dream: the Internet.

Now all kinds of open source handset sources are popular again: Taobao.

But when Sony began to give up the handset market, we began to realize that the handset wants to do well only depends on performance is not enough, the game lineup, software ecology is the core competitiveness of the handset.

The birth and development of smart phones have further expanded the threshold for entry into the handset industry, and the traditional handset market has shrunk substantially since 2010. At present, we can call it two successful models-Nintendo's Nintendo Switch and Valve's Steam Deck, in which Switch as an anomaly in the handset, let's not mention it for the time being, but the path that Steam Deck is taking is more valuable to discuss.

What if there are no upstream game developers to develop their own games for the device? Two conventional ways of thinking:

1. Improve the performance of the equipment to operate the off-the-shelf Windows system and solve the problem of the game lineup, which is what most Win handsets are doing.

2, optimize the existing full-platform games and their own equipment to adapt to this kind of game, this is the road that Steam Deck is taking.

After all, carrying Windows system is a kind of opportunism. the reality is that Win handset manufacturers are using two ideas to design products in parallel, but with different emphasis.

Take AYANEO's newly released AYANEO2 as an example, its AMD Ryzen 76800U processor and 50.25Wh battery are designed to provide good performance.

At the same time, the self-developed AYANEO OS,AYANEO based on Linux system and AYANEO claims that players can have more efficient operation efficiency, lower power consumption, more elegant interface and more immersive experience on this system.

We can see that AYANEO has optimized its user experience and game compatibility, and is affirming its efforts and achievements, but there is still no law to avoid that it uses the same architecture as computers, runs computer systems, and is essentially a Windows-based product.

Image source: AYANEO

Whether it is AYANEO, OnexPlayer or GPD, products of this brand that use Windows or support the installation of Windows can directly call the game library on the PC side in the game ecology, and these Windows handsets can also run games that Windows notebooks can run. Moreover, the mature Windows system also reduces the development difficulty and cost of these brands.

However, after all, the Win handset is a tricky way to solve the lack of game lineup, and Windows is not a system developed specifically for games and game handsets, so it still needs a lot of adaptation for manufacturers to transplant the system to the handset. It should be noted that the blue screen, software flashback, automatic updates, driver incompatibility, missing driver files and all the problems encountered by all Windows computers in the process of installing and running games may occur on it.

The live broadcast lasts more than 8 hours, and Uncle tail has basically been in a state of excitement. Photo Source: Weibo

And the brand side of the Win handset due to volume reasons, in the face of chip manufacturers do not have bargaining power, basically what the supply chain has, they use. Therefore, due to the limitation of power supply and size, the early Win handset can only use mobile platform, and the weak performance of Intel UHD Graphics can only feed some independent games or simulators with low configuration requirements.

Until Su Ma did a good thing for lightweight books and Win handsets, she launched a low-power, energy-efficient APU solution. It can be said that until the emergence of the AMD Ryzen 4000 series, the Win handset developers did not have a chip scheme with excellent performance and power consumption, and the Win handset finally had the basic ability to run 3A games.

The original Win handset is used in this game key layout, as we all know, it is basically the source of anti-human operation: network.

Taking the AMDRyzen 76800U processor installed in AYANEO 2 as an example, it adopts 6nm technology, Zen3+CPU architecture, 8-core 16 threads, frequency 2.7-4.GHz, second-level cache 4MB, third-level cache 16MB, integrated Radeon 680m GPU,RDNA2 architecture, 12 units and 768 stream processors. However, the performance of RDNA2 kernel display can also be equivalent to that of GTX 1650 on notebook.

On the other hand, Steam Deck has made a lot of efforts on optimization. SteamDeck uses an AMD Zen2 architecture of 4-core 8-thread processing chip, while the GPU part uses 8 sets of AMD RDNA2 computing units, floating-point computing power up to 1.6 TFlops FP32. It belongs to a chip customized by AMD for Steam Deck, and its performance is not high.

However, through the powerful developer channel, Valve makes some games specially optimized for Steam Deck, and at the same time, it gives part of the initiative to users through the convenient and sophisticated energy consumption control system provided by Steam OS. Players can choose to run games with high picture quality and high power consumption, or they can choose low picture quality and low power consumption. It not only satisfies the pursuit of experience players, but also satisfies the players who pay more attention to portability, which is a win-win situation.

Why do game handsets compete with smartphones? for hardcore players, there is no competition between handsets and mobile phones. But users who have been educated by the smartphone experience are also difficult to accept a game handheld with a battery life of only a few hours and a weight of more than 600g.

Today's Win handset has a battery life of about 2-8 hours (the battery life fluctuates obviously due to different operating loads), and most of them weigh more than 600g (Steam Deck weighs about 669g, AYANEO 2 weighs about 680g and the AYANEO 2 weighs about 398g). Compared with phones weighing no more than 250g, there is obviously a lot of room for improvement.

Just like the Game Gear launched by Sega at that time, because it was equipped with a very advanced color LCD screen, huge power consumption, and the consequence of high performance was that the fuselage was very bulky, and the game lasted only 3 hours, far less than the 8-hour battery life of GB at that time, which became the biggest hard wound of GAMEGEAR, no matter how Sega invested in the software.

Of course, the most important thing is that with the rapid improvement of smartphone processor performance, under the temptation of the huge mobile phone market, more and more game developers choose to transplant games to mobile. After all, it has long been an indisputable fact that the revenue of mobile games surpasses that of PC.

In 2012, when PC game makers were still discussing whether to enter mobile games, the iOS version of "Shenxian Road" was launched, becoming the first test product of horizontal RPG page games on the mobile platform. Subsequently, such as "Legend", "Star change", "Dream Zhu Xian" and other established client games, also began to cross-platform attempt.

League of Legends mobile game version source: network

The adaptation of the PC game IP to mobile games has become a development "shortcut" for major game companies, including many shoddy game products. Until 2015, with the upgrade of smartphone hardware and the jump in the quality of mobile games, PC games were restored with "Crossing the Fire Line", "Crossing the Fireline", "QQ Speed", "Crazy Racing Kart Rider" and other "authentic". The quality of mobile games infinitely close to the PC side appeared, opening a new era of PC game transplantation. In recent years, games such as "League of Legends Mobile Games", "Moore Manor" and "Apex Hero" have achieved good results on mobile.

Image source: network

In addition to online games, you can also find a large number of Steam transplant games on the TapTap platform. No matter they are foreign studios or domestic manufacturers, high-score games on Steam are non-stop transplanting mobile devices. At the same time, the time interval between a console or PC on the mobile side is getting shorter and shorter, and the difference in game content is getting smaller and smaller. Whether PC, mobile phones, iPad, or consoles, game makers are only part of a multi-platform or cross-platform revenue plan.

At the previous Blizzard Carnival, call of Duty, one of the company's most valuable IP, announced that it would launch a mobile game version, and in the subsequent exposure of the game, the stand-alone campaign mode is obviously not interested in Blizzard. After all, this similar "buyout" game, one is that it is difficult for players to have continuous pleasure, and the other is that manufacturers can not make a profit through micro trading. And PC players belong to the more serious power, do not care about these gaudy gift boxes, and mobile games is likely to be another situation, now mobile games pay attention to "krypton gold", and "PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS" this relatively fair model, is precisely this kind of kryptonium model "sanctuary", the record is not important, the characters in the game is more beautiful is to show off capital Coupled with the growing popularity of smartphones among minors, it's hard not to be sure that such a large IP will become a new "gold mine" that Blizzard is looking for.

Photo Source: call of Duty Mobile Game has begun to make a reservation. Photo Source: Play Store

Nowadays, more and more PC games are migrated to mobile, and some mobile games also enter PC after quality upgrade. Three-terminal interworking, even multi-terminal interworking of hosts and other platforms, may be the inevitable trend of market development in the future. when the ecological barrier is gradually broken, Win handset will still have core competitiveness in the face of the huge user group of smartphone market. I think this will be a problem that all Win handset brands need to think about and urgently solve in the future.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: non-objective Laboratory (ID:zhinan617), author: lzh

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