Valve and its Steam Deck have developed gamers' appetite for these small machines... which also benefits other manufacturers.
Manufacturers such as AYANEO, AOKZOE or GPD Win did not wait for Valve to distribute very small machines based on the architecture of our classic PC. These small machines could take the form of a tiny laptop or a small console close to Nintendo's machines. However, this market has always been considered as a niche unable to take off and really make gamers get out of their gaming chairs to let - at least for a few hours - the PC rest.
Still? Obviously not. So, the publisher Valve, first known for the hits such as Half-Life, Half-Life 2 or Portal and now even more popular thanks to the number one dematerialized platform on PC, Steam, has set out to design machines. We all remember the bitter failure of the "Steam Machines" which had to convince about as many players as Nintendo's Virtual Boy in its time. A failure that didn't calm down Gabe Newell (CEO of Valve) and his teams. Only a few months after the official announcement of the Steam Deck, Valve's new machine was launched and the first copies delivered in the middle of last year.
The Steam Deck looks like a standard PC with components that are well known to PC gamers, but adopts a format that is much closer to that of Nintendo's Switch: a PC, but one that you can take everywhere with you, slipped into your backpack. A PC that obviously relies on Steam's dematerialized catalog and takes advantage of the quiet transition of many PC gamers to the gamepad for many styles of games. The success was largely at the rendezvous and if this benefits the AYANEO, AOKZOE or GPD Win mentioned earlier, it has also given ideas to other companies like the illustrious ASUS.
Specialized in motherboards, but diversified for a long time in many fields (keyboards, mice, screens, laptops, routers, power supplies, projectors...), ASUS has gathered all its skills to design its vision of the Steam Deck. A vision called ROG Ally that we should be able to discover very soon if we believe many rumors: the release could even happen before the beginning of summer 2023, although ASUS has kept from confirming anything.
In order to stand out from Valve, however, ASUS needs some striking arguments. While the ROG Ally's screen is also 7 inches diagonally, it incorporates a Full HD (1080p) panel while the Steam Deck has to make do with 800p. ASUS is also trying to fight Valve on the performance front and is taking advantage of the increased power of the new AMD APUs. While the Steam Deck is based on an APU with Zen2 (CPU) and RDNA2 (GPU) cores, the ROG Ally can count on a component combining Zen4 and RDNA3 to offer " up to twice the performance" according to its promoter.
Finally, beyond the question of availability, all observers are wondering how ASUS will manage to position itself on the price side. Indeed, Valve has succeeded in offering its entry-level Steam Deck at 419 euros, with two other slightly more advanced models at 549 and 679 euros. From what we know today, ASUS should not be able to match this price, but the latest leak confirms the release of two versions of the ROG Ally: the first is based on a 6-core/12-thread chip (the "normal" Z1) while the second opts for an 8-core/16-thread chip (Z1 Extreme). The price will probably not be 419 euros, but we can expect a Z1 model more affordable than the Chinese competitors and a more "luxurious" Z1 Extreme.
