Logitech has been gaining presence in the PC gaming market for a while, but it looks like the company is now preparing to expand in a massive way. Logitech has announced that it is working with Tencent, a Chinese publisher with a massive reach, to create a dedicated gaming device in the same way as Valve's Steam Deck or Nintendo's Switch. Here's the twist: instead of primarily focusing on local games as has been the model since the first Game Boy, this one will be focused on streaming cloud games.
Logitech states in a press release the new device will support multiple cloud gaming services and that both companies are working closely with the Nvidia GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming teams. It's quite interesting to refer to the names of the most popular gaming streaming platforms. The Switch is built on Nvidia’s Tegra platform, which was originally designed to support high-end ARM mobile gaming. The Steam Deck utilizes an extremely efficient AMD Ryzen platform x64-based Ryzen platform. However, the Logitech G handheld, which is still to be named, could cut down on local hardware and offload most of the heavy lifting to remote streaming servers.
According to the announcement that the Logitech handheld will be available at the end of the calendar year. No technical details were released, but a streaming-focused device certainly suggests an ARM-based gaming machine, perhaps similar in size and factor to something like the Ayn Loki, GPD XD Plus, and various other mobile game machines. The device could be able to be sold at a competitive price by sacrificing the expensive hardware needed for high-end local playback.
Tencent and Logitech are two of the companies that have attempted to challenge Nintendo's dominance of portable gaming consoles. Nvidia tried its game with the original Shield handheld before moving on to tablets and set-top boxes. Gservers Although "Gaming phones", such as the Asus ROG or Black Shark series, are growing in popularity, they are not gaining much traction outside of Asia, where buyers tend to think of phones as their primary or sole gaming platform.
Razer and Qualcomm have teamed up to create an Snapdragon-powered portable game concept device earlier in the year (pictured above), but little has been seen of it so far. Although mobile gaming on Android and iOS is a hugely profitable segment of the games industry - the most profitable sector in all of it stand-alone gaming machines built around mobile games aren't yet in the mainstream. Between-game accessories such as the Razer Kishi are about as close as we've come.
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Valve's Steam Deck is the largest mobile gaming platform since the Switch's debut in 2017. It's larger and more expensive than the Switch, but it also makes use of PC gaming's largest market as a pre-existing platform. Valve's PC-centric approach approaches portable gaming from a new angle, as will the Logitech G device. Both the Steam Deck and the Nintendo Switch are able to stream games (the latter can stream some titles that its ARM-based hardware is unable to handle, like ports of Control, Kingdom Hearts 3, and Dying Light 2), however, they are focused on games loaded and running on the hardware of the handheld itself.
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