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cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/3922769
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The original was posted on /r/linustechtips by /u/RevolutionaryAd8204 on 2024-09-14 15:50:43+00:00.
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Can you actually use steamdeck as a desktop PC though? Can it drive dual external monitors? Is it a reasonable “minipc” type thing? How much power does it munch on in idle?
Can I maybe put some other linux distro on it? So many questions
I have a Steam deck, here’s the answers to my knowledge:
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Yes, you can connect a keyboard and mouse, and even in SteamOS they let you access KDE in a separate “Desktop mode”
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Not sure about multiple monitors but you can connect at least one. There are docks made for it to do just that (the USB C cable has display port support I think)
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It runs a 4 core/8 thread AMD laptop chip so assuming you get a mouse/keyboard it should work pretty well.
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It has a 5W mode in the power settings in SteamOS so I’m assuming around that much at idle.
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You can put other distros on it, it’s completely unlocked. You could even put Windows on it if you wanted. I’m not sure how easy the install process is though since I’ve just left SteamOS on mine.
Not sure about multiple monitors
Most usb-c ports with DP alt mode support up to 1 monitor at 4k@60Hz, or 2×1080p@60Hz, and I believe 2×1440p@30Hz. It comes down to bandwidth, so I think that as long as you’re fine with one monitor running at a slower refresh-rate or lower resolution, you can have your primary screen displaying in high-res.
Of course, you have to also take into consideration the GPU performance, running higher resolutions will usually degrade performance!
Probably not great for games but it could totally drive a 1440p or even 4k monitor if you’re only using it for web/office/media playback. I’m curious to know if other people are using it as a general computer.
Edit: some people are totally using it as a general computer: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/09/frame-of-mind-developer-ended-up-coding-the-game-on-steam-deck-for-a-year/
You can even put Windows on it if you feel like committing blasphemy
Now I want to get MacOS on one just to make gamers twitch
Not sure if this counts but (Reddit link warning) someone managed to do it in a VM
That’s just as gross as I was imagining 😬
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In short yes. I use it as a mini pc, with dual monitor set-up.
Can you actually use steamdeck as a desktop PC though?
Depends on how many pixels you “need”. Running high resolution monitors, even for basic stuff can get costly performance wise pretty damn quick, but in my opinion that isn’t really asking the same question as whether the Steam Deck can be a good desktop.
You can absolutely use the Steam Deck as a desktop, I frequently use my Steam Deck in desktop mode… using the onboard controls. The only real limitation of the Steam Deck so long as you don’t expect it to be a top of the line gaming pc, is that most people who buy it are never truly going to be able to give anything else other than a mouse and keyboard an honest go, they are too impatient and won’t believe it can work but the sky is the limit for joystick+gyro input (our touchpad + gyro) for computers/gaming.
How good does it work on an external 4K monitor? Can you watch 4k video? I imagine youtube and browsing reddit or news online shouldn’t be a problem.
Basically I’d like an ultra low power PC for boring desktop stuff on 4k monitor.
If that’s all you need, a Raspberry Pi 5 will fit the bill nicely. It’s got two 4K HDMI outputs and it’s roughly on par compute-wise with a higher end Chromebook. You won’t be gaming on this thing – it can just about play a YouTube video at 4K60 – but it’ll gladly handle your desktop stuff. As a bonus it’s about an eighth the price of a Steam Deck.
You know what the main difference between the Steam Deck OLED and the PS5 Pro is? Customers wanted and asked for the Steam Deck OLED.
I really like my PS5, but I see no value in a model costing 80% more and being only current for half a generation.
All that for an “up to” 40% performance increase.
I don’t care how much of a graphics nerd someone is, that just isn’t worth it.
And if you’re that much of a graphics nerd, you own a PC.
A game that was released last year has absolutely zero knowledge of this 8k PS5 so it’s not going to magically render at 8k or 40% improvement. Some might get a framerate bump if frame sync can be turned off - the game might have been GPU bound and therefore with a better GPU it yields a better framerate. Sometimes. And AI upscaling might give a pseudo > 4k effect but it’s not really true 8k.
A handful of games might get patched to avail of the improved rendering capabilities when they detect PS5 Pro. Minimal stuff really. Maybe the config file will improve draw distance or turn on certain effects like raytraced shadows / reflections when it knows the console can handle it.
Hardly seems worth the vast additional expense especially if somebody already owns a PS5 though. Moreso because Sony are trying to stiff people into buying the cheaper “digital” version which basically means any physical collection won’t work with it.
The most expensive Steam Deck is still cheaper in my country. €680. While the PS5 Pro is €800.
And many will just buy the cheaper version and replace the SSD by themselves. The 512GB OLED version plus a 2TB drive is only €50 more expensive than the 1TB version. So even with like for like storage it’s still cheaper than the PS5P
I love the steamdeck. In almost always dock it and use it as my default computer.
If I did not NEED windows for a SINGLE work app, it would probably be my only computer.
I have never felt as much envy as seeing someone play BG3 on an 8 hr flight. That was what sold me.
To cap it off the SOB killed Scratch and the Owlbear Cub. That flight was actual torture for multiple reasons.
Was BG3 smooth? I’m getting jealous if it was. It’s a hot mess on my shitty PC.
It is. From my experience a couple months back its crisp. Not the highest graphics, and it took a little getting used to from a high-end PC, but it was really nice. In certain aspects even preferable xD
It might do now. They’ve done a lot of improvements.
Even on PS5 it was an absolute mess in co-op. 30fps (if you were lucky) all round, constant freezes (several seconds) when swapping characters, many many crashes. Whenever we told it to save, we’d have to both touch nothing to make sure it didn’t crash while saving. Oh, and there was a bug meaning only the player who chose to sleep for the day would get any companion progression.
I didn’t play much of it but it ran well when I tired it. I just decided it was the type of game I wanted to plat with all the settings maxed on my laptop.
It couldn’t play at max settings?
In general the Steam Deck is not the kind of device that is going to run things at max settings. You are gonna play at 720p30FPS low settings but be happy you can play at all on a train or airplane. It’s really meant to be a competitor to the Nintendo Switch than a replacement for a gaming PC.
You can stream from your PC to your couch or bed if you are at home.
Definitely not on Steam Deck.
I imagine certain scenes especially in the 3rd act would put alot of strain on the steam deck
I think they were playing at a low res. 720p or maybe 480p. That said they didn’t even have stuttering. It was really impressive.
Mine is still on order haven’t got it yet.
Steam Deck screen is only 800p so that’s the resolution for all games. And it’s perfect for the screen size.
I’m so glad Valve did not give in to the tech-number-nerds who want 2K resolution on tiny screens, saves so much battery life.
Like I said it was clear and smooth. I don’t expect 4k in a handheld. Portable is it’s own metric.
Yep quite right, I was just clarifying because you said “low res. 720p or maybe 480p” - the Steam Deck is 800p native. Total agreement.
I’d be happy if it played Owlcat RPGs at near full settings. Those games are allot more fun than BG3, imo.
I digress though. It’d be nice to be able to play recent games again. If the deck can do that on my TV, I’m down.
We hook our Steam Deck up to a 4k projector and it looks amazing. The built in upscaler from 800p to 4k is astonishingly good. Obviously not AS good as native but and many games are limited to 30fps but holy smokes it’s more than good enough.
Hell yeah another Kingmaker/WOTR fan.
WotR for the win. never played Kingmaker. And I just got Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader. I don’t understand how these games aren’t more popular.
I feel like BG3 is big just because the camera zooms in close to the characters.
Kingmaker is fantastic. I’m not that big a fan of Rogue Trader though. I kinda hate the Imperium of Man, in 40K I am Ork only.
If you enjoy Owlcat then the Pillars and Tyranny from Obsidian are fantastic.
I’m going to look up all of their games eventually. They go hard on the systems and that’s a severely lacking quality these days.
Rogue Trader is cool, I’m only a few hours into it though. But man, the camera kills me. It’s got a weird rubber band effect to it that I don’t like.
But it’s mostly a nice improvement, or at least some different takes, on the WotR systems. My main complaint about their games is even with auto end turn on it never automatically ends any turns.
Wow 8hrs, I’ve never gotten more than 2 on a laptop
The plane had USB chargers in the arm rest, but not 120v unfortunately.
That’s an expensive steam deck 😆
PS5 Pro: PRObably not for you
And for those who have not tried it, the desktop is fully functional (not some half baked version. My son uses the desktop mode as a full school workstation for internet browsing, email, teams, Google docs, etc
More people should thank KDE for the desktop mode.
Indeed… I avoided it for years because I bought into the “it’s too heavy” narrative.
Then I saw a phoronics benchmark sayin it was actually faster and lighter than lxde if you turn effects off
I tried it then and was blown away, never looked back
I don’t know what the KDE devs eat, but they are somehow maximising both features and performance.
Incredible.
I don’t know what the KDE devs eat
LOL loved that
That sells it for me. Steam Deck is in my future. Windows will not be my next OS.
I pretty much only use mine in desktop mode and I’m currently playing world of warcraft on it lol!
To me, it’s looking like a replacement for a PC and a portable device, and does not need to compete against a console. And that’s what I’m looking for. I’m just sick of the rising price of video cards, and the worsening state of Windows. I’ve had plans to upgrade my video card for a while now, and could never justify it. I feel like it’s as viable now to get a Deck and a PS5 Slim or a Pro than to get a PC and another portable. PC gobbles up too much power as a desktop nowadays and too expensive as a premium machine.
It was my steam deck that convinced me to just wipe windows from my laptop and install Kubuntu which is basically the same as steamOS. I had no idea Linux desktop was so good these days. Bye bye windows! I love my steam deck but I also still need a laptop form factor, I can’t always dock it and use it as my PC.
That is KDE Plasma for those who are curious. It is one of the main desktop environments in Linux. It is my daily driver on my main PC. It is the most customizable desktop I know of. There is nothing you can’t change.
Hi there, just a small correction. Compared to existing linux distros, it’s slightly different. Steam OS is an immutable OS, which means you can’t edit the root partition (Like you can’t edit the C:\ drive in Windows). This is both good and bad.
Good -> Users can’t mess up their device while trying to mess around with it. Updates are smooth because Valve knows the previous state of the OS.
Bad -> It’s bad only for extreme power users as it’s not fully customizable. You can’t run your own kernel, install certain build packages to do some advanced stuff. But this is a tiny tiny bad.
Overall, Steam OS is great and I believe will be the gateway for the general PC crowd.
Thank you for the correction, although I was only talking about the desktop environment. I understand the immutable part of it :)
I’m using Fedora KDE right now for their Wayland support, because I wanted stuff like FreeSync on my AMD GPU, but I do miss Cinnamon. And Autokey.
Thanks to KDE on the SD, I’ve switched my main DE on my desktop. Still have a soft spot for XFCE, but KDE Plasma on the SD was polished and was very “coherent”.
One thing the SD is missing for being a complete “serious” computer is printing support. I’m sure I could it installed, the SD is eminently hackable, but a Flatpak solution or a Steam default solution would really justify using a SD in Desktop mode for school and work.
It doesn’t have cups? You should be able to install it and plasma’s ctrl+p should work with it.
I had to use mine as a desktop for two weeks while my PC was undergoing a repair. It was wholly uneventful: installed OpenOffice and had a wholly normal workweek. It’s perfectly fine to use as a regular, boring desktop if you need it to. Absolutely love the Steamdeck. Every gamer should have one.
I’ve been complaining about printer support. It’s pretty much the last piece of the puzzle for a school focused SD.
There’s a workaround where you can install Chrome then install ipp/cups printing from the chrome web store, then save whatever file you need printed to Google docs.
I used mine for a few months for work. only problem i had with it was it struggled with multiple external monitors. i got it working but i had to fiddle with xrandr everytime i docked it and put it into desktop mode
This was a couple years ago now though, it might be better now.
And I can install games from other store fronts if I want.
I’m not sure if it’s the meme but here (Europe) there is a huge difference in price between the basic 512GB OLED SD and the basic PS5 pro option.
569€ vs 800€.
… and you have to pay for PS Plus repetitively to play games with friends.
Jokes on you I don’t have any friends
Eventually, Sony will stop supporting the PS5 and it’ll be a brick. If Valve ever stops supporting the Steamdeck, it’ll keep running.
All (most?) of your games will run on your future computers.
You can play DOS games just fine right now, so yes it’s a good bet. And a far better bet than the PS6 being backwards compatible.
The crazy thing for me is that I have a little handheld specific for dos games. The problem I run into every time is having to setup computer keyboard bindings for each game to play them using the built-in controller. I really want retroarch or another dos emulator to do profiles for different games and I haven’t seen that yet.
Unless they change CPU architectures.
And even then it’s no guarantee. Plenty of games needed support from the likes of GoG to run. Hell, I couldn’t even play Ex Machina because I had a HDR monitor and the game detected that and completely broke. Disabling HDR in Windows did nothing.
Unless they change CPU architectures.
well. there’s already winlator (basically box86 / wine-wrapper for android).
Not as polished and far as Proton is, but the bones are there.A CPU architecture change wouldn’t be a deathblow.
Ex Machina the movie or the 1984 “game”? That’s before Mario was even a thing.
Fucking auto correct…
It was Nex Machina.
That’s a 2017 game
Yes, I know. And I already can’t play it due to changes in hardware.
That doesn’t make any sense. I can play multiple games from 2017 with no problem at all. I play games from 2012 and up just fine too. That’s something the devs messed up for that specific game, or it’s a problem with your PC.
After over 3 decades as a gamer and tech user this is maybe the single most consistent important benefit for any open platform were you can just install Linux.
The rest is nice but this one means that 10 or 20 years from now your hardware might have been repurposed for something else and still be useful and in use whilst a closed platform will just be more junk in a junkyard or sitting in a box of those things you’ve kept just because you don’t like to throw expensive stuff away but will in practice never use again.
Also I’m that scenario, you know Valve only gave it up for something dramatically better.
These devices have different use cases. Steam Deck also is digital only. If a publisher decides to kill a game, they can control whether you can or can’t play the game. PS5 Pro is expensive, but so are video cards nowadays. PS5 Pro is just following a trend set years before, including the shift from physical games and cost. The only way to stop anti-consumer trends is to stop buying expensive hardware (PS5 Pro included). Also, give some love to physical copies of games.
Saying the Steam Deck is digital only is like saying a tower computer is digital only. That’s purely false. If you can put it on a tower computer, you can put it on the Steam Deck.
All the Steam Deck, like many modern tower computers, needs for physical copies is a USB media reader.
If we can argue that Sony will stop supporting the PS5 in the future, who’s to say in the future, (without the good leadership), Steam won’t restrict what can be put on the Steam Deck? We have a lot of arguments for wanting a Steam Deck and an alternative OS to boot for gaming, but saying PS5 will be bricked in the future is not a strong one.
- Take Steam Deck
- Wipe OS and install Bazzite/Nobara
- Install Heroic Launcher / Non Steam Launcher
- Install games from them
Nuclear apocalypse happens and internet is down
- Get ISOs of games in a USB drive
- Plug it into the deck and install
Because the Steam Deck is just computer hardware. I can already install whatever OS I want to and Steam won’t know that it’s a Steam Deck anymore.
Beacause, Today, I can already load another OS on the Steamdeck. Not so much on the PS5.
Device, maybe. What happens to the games bought from a DRM monopoly?
It plays piracy-reclaimed games just fine.
While valve has a lot of deserved goodwill, that’s always the problem - they’re well-behaved, but set up in a way in which the customer has no leverage if they where to change their approach tommorow.
Good thing drm-free games run just as well on the steam deck.
Which do i choose? The $300 dollar deck and a $100 tb drive
No joke, I’m tempted to buy a Steam Deck (or true Linux phone) because… It can run a local HTML/CSS/JS app on a browser with filesystem access and audio support. This is the power of having an OS that is not locked down.
Speaking of which, what would you recommend for me to run a local HTML/CSS/JS app on a browser with filesystem access and audio support? (No, Android is too locked down to meet that spec) Other required specs:
- Portable: Can fit in a pocket
- 16GB or more usable storage
- Bluetooth support
- Ideally low-cost
I have an Orange PI Pro 5 16GB on a box that smoothly runs a full blown Ubuntu Desktop version and would fit in a pocket though it’s maybe a little too thick (from memory the box it’s about 3x5x2 cm).
Total cost was about $170.
The board itself would fit a thinner box, but you might have to 3D print one.
Mind you, a N100 Mini-PC that costs the same is even more capable as a Linux Desktop, but it’s significantly larger and will definitely not fit a pocket.
You can find cheaper SBCs capable of running a Desktop Ubuntu but in my experience (with a $35 Banana Pi P2-Zero) if you go too far down the price scale Desktop Linux performance stops being smooth, even if the board is a tiny thing.
It was actually quite surprising for me recently when I found out some of these things are perfectly capable Linux Desktops.
Decktility maybe
You can probably encase a Raspberry PI with a battery and a touch screen, micro SD cards can go much higher than 16, and install Linux. Keep in mind that the Linux touch UIs aren’t really great imo, the best experience I’ve had so far is the steam deck.
If you think $700 is bad, it’s £700 in the UK… which is $913. 🤢
Also:
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median household income, UK (2022): £32,400 ($42,265)
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median household income, USA (2022): $74,580
A PS5 Pro is 26% of the typical UK household monthly income.
A PS5 Pro is 11% of the typical US household monthly income.
The US pricing is bad. The UK pricing is absolutely insane.
The OLED Deck starts at £479. Still a lot but not as egregious. The LCD Deck is currently £262 ($344), which is pretty great.
If you think 26% is bad, in Russia it’s going to be priced at around ₽80-100k(~$883, VAT included), but the median monthly salary is ₽43.500 - $480… That’s well over 100% median household income given that over 38% families only have a single parent. And I’m pretty sure that’s not even the worst out there, think like Argentina has an extortionate import tax or something?
If you think $700 is bad
I don’t:
Charts like that are great, I love to see them. However, they need to have a year for the inflation-adjusted dollars else it’s nearly meaningless when referred back to.
Cool chart.
It really makes the point to me that the PS1 and PS2, when adjusted for inflation, and for relative compute power, were just such a fantastic deal.
I was recovering from some serious console-purchase fatigue, when I bought my PS1 to replace my garage sale purchased Super NES. It was a big deal to me.
I’ve paid PS5 prices (inflation adjusted) for a game system a few times (my first Switch and SteamDeck), but they’ve been a lot more mind blowing than what appears to be on offer today.
Disclaimer: My favorite game is 8-bit, anyway.
Also drives home the point the PS3 was insanely priced.
So the most comparable console there is $456, and this is $700.
That is bad.
The PS5 Pro barely costs more to produce.
$700 is bad. $913 is awful.
Just because the PS3 (a console universally panned as being way too expensive) was similar doesn’t mean PS5 Pro pricing is alright.
I’m not sure what this proves 🤔
Anyone know the cost in the US including tax? Don’t they leave that off?
It varies state by state, some like Oregon have 0% tax, but most will be around
13%6-8% or so iirc.The highest state sales tax is 9.56%, most states are 6-8%. Though some major cities also have a small sales tax as well.
I live in Washington state and I’m pretty certain the sales tax here is 10% (slightly higher than your maximum figure of 9.56%). It’s a pretty well known trick here that you can account for tax just by decimal shifting and adding (ex: 5.29$ without would be 5.29$ + 0.529$ ~= 5.81$ with tax). Is that 9.56% an “in practice” figure that accounts for rounding down? I’m curious where you read it.
I found it on This website. WA is listed at 9.38%. I’m guessing your county or city has an additional sales tax.
That’s the average local + state sales tax in Washington. State sales tax is 6.5%, local varies from 1.2% - 3.85% (Seattle, for a total of 10.35%)
Thanks for the correction!
No sales tax in NH either.
how does this work if you live close to another state? As in if you live in a state with sales tax but down the road is a state without sales tax- why ever shop in your state?
Convenience. Unless you live right near the border, it’s probably faster/easier to shop in your own state than drive all the way to another.
But if you do live near the border of a state without a sales tax, then it’s pretty common to shop in the neighboring state, especially for larger purchases.
In Washington alcohol is so expensive that any reasonably sized party of alcoholics it’s cheaper to drive across the entire state to buy in Idaho (forgive this disaster of a sentence structure I’m awake like 5hr early because of cats)
As in if you live in a state with sales tax but down the road is a state without sales tax- why ever shop in your state?
Mostly the states are quite big, so it’s not worth the trouble. But along various state borders, it distorts the shopping experience in odd ways.
I’ve been to towns that are missing common retailers entirely, because everyone drives to the next town over (in another state), to avoid a tax.
We also have a rich history of driving across state lines to purchase stuff that’s illegal in our own state. It’s also illegal to bring it back, but the borders aren’t patrolled, so the only way to get caught is to have a traffic violation while doing it.
Or so I’ve heard. I never break any laws, myself.
To put details to other person’s point: Even if you lived pretty close, for a lot of things, the gas cost would probably offset a lot of the savings. For big things for sure it would make some sense but for other things it just wouldn’t make any sense. You’d have to live right on the border and have a town with stores that carry whatever you’re buying also be pretty close.
You still have to waste 30 minutes of your time driving over there. I’m not wasting 30 minutes of my time to save $5
Texas has 8.25% but New Mexico is 5.125%
Sunland Park, NM (which is part of El Paso, TX metro are has an additional city+county tax of 2.125% so the taxes are the same as in Texas (the numbers may be slightly off, but the final tax rate is very close to Texas)
In some cases like that, where you’re in a state that has no sales tax, but near the border of one that does, they’ll actually check ID and charge you sales tax if you’re from the sales tax state.
In most countries it’s the sale point which matters, not which state you reside in, for indirect tax. I would assume it’s the same in the US. For example if you’re on holiday in a different state or country, they wouldn’t charge what you’re charged back home.
Yep, but the states with sales tax get tired of getting cheated out of their tax revenue. The specific example where I saw this was a major hardware store chain in Oregon (no sales tax) right near the border of Washington (6.5% sales tax). They asked everyone “Washington or Oregon” at the register and checked ID for anyone who said Oregon.
Quick search says that Washington considers it a “sales and use” tax, so anything purchased out of state, but intended for use in Washington is supposed to be taxed. Kinda messed up, really.
Vancouver Washington residents drive to PDX for their jobs, to shop, eat dinner etc…
The US doesn’t have a national sales tax, so it depends whether the individual state imposes a tax or not.
I don’t remember exactly, but some relative poverty lines start at 60% of median household income.
- £700 / (£32,400 * .6 / 12) ≈ .43, thus 43% of monthly income for a poor household in the UK
- $700 / ($74,580 * .6 / 12) ≈ .19, thus 19% of monthly income for a poor household in the US
I hope median household income is netto, otherwise this is skewed.
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Subscription for Internet access is the one that’s always baffled me. What a stupid business model. I guess devices not belonging to their buyers is not a new thing.
is it for “internet” or access to ps servers?
It was MS that started that back on the OG Xbox.
I think all the F2P ones (and a handful of others like FFXIV) are exempt from it. At least on Playstation.
It makes sense because servers are expensive to operate. The real scam is nintendo where you pay for P2P multiplayer…
They’re expensive when you’re not already building a CDN for delivery of massive files all around the world. Economies of scale quickly matter there.
They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.
Remember that Sony gets a cut from games being distributed to their platform, so online fees are just them double dipping for extra profits.
Web servers are different from game servers. You need a lot of performance and fast low latency servers to keep up with realtime game play. Webservers however dont need that and can benefit of load balancing accross multiple servers. Scale of economy helps a lot, but with game servers the cost doesnt change much because a session has to be on a single machine.
As for distribution costs, most of the cost is manufacturing and physical distribution of discs. So yeah, they are making a killing by continuing to take a a huge cut from game sales when most of their distribution is online.
At some point in my career I’ve actually designed mission critical high performance distributed server systems for a living, so I’m well aware of that.
You can still pack thousands of users per server and have very low latency as long as you use the right architecture for it (it’s mainly done with in-memory caching and load balancing) when you’re accessing gigantic datasets which far exceed the data space of a game where the actual shared data space is miniscule since all clients share a local copy of most of the dataspace - i.e. the game level they’re playing in - and even with the most insane anti-cheat logic that checks every piece of data coming in from the user side against a server-side copy of the “game level data space” it’s still but a fraction of the shared data space in equivalent situations in the corporate world, plus it tends to be easilly partitionable data (i.e. even in MMORG with a single fully open massive playing space, players only affect limited areas of the entire game space so you don’t really need to check the actions of a player against the data of all other players).
Also keep in mind that all the static (never changing or slow changing stuff) like achievements or immutable level configuration can still be served with “normal” latencies.
Further the kind LVL1 ISP that provides network access for companies like Sony servicing millions of users already has more than good enough latency in their normal service and hence Sony needs not pay extra for “low latency”.
Anyways, you do make a good and valid point, it’s just that IMHO that’s the kind of thing that pushes the running costs per-player-month from one dollar cents or less to, at most (and this is likely quite a large overestimation), a dollar per-player-month unless they only have tens of players per-server (which would be insane and they should fire their systems designers if that’s the case).
They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.
It’s the same on xbox
