I just canceled my PlayStation 5 pre-order for "Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth"-- I'm going to buy it on Steam instead.

As horrible as Microsoft is, and as buggy as their software has always been, right now Windows 11 with Ryzen CPUs and Nvidia GPUs, plus the latter's drivers, have really settled into a stable equilibrium: every time I boot my PC and play a game, with that cool Lazio "Series" controller I custom-ordered a year or two ago, everything "just works": the game runs, whatever game that may be, no crashes, perfect HDR, and hitting between eighty and one hundred and twenty frames per second, on my LG C3 OLED TV with G-Sync.

Almost unbelievably, even the dreaded "Xbox Game Bar" has been one hundred percent working. The subsequent workflow of copying the captured screenshots and videos to my M2 MacBook Air for publishing or editing in the fabulous "iMovie" has been working seamlessly.

The final element which brings the ecosystem full circle is the OLED Steam Deck: it's a better version of the Nintendo Switch, for the PC environment; it has surprisingly impressive performance-- dialed down graphics settings aren't very noticeable on the device's display, and the ability to lock the screen to a given refresh rate is almost as good as VRR; and on top of that, it's an HDR-capable "Wii U Gamepad" for the PC, thanks to Steam's "Remote Play".

Of course, online play is gratis, and the whole ecosystem is so wide open that one can edit files anywhere on disk down to the binary level with hex editors if they so choose. Want to make games? No expensive dev kit or licensing required. Want to run emulators? Wide open. Want to connect to a CRT TV with a custom overscan-circumventing resolution? Works flawlessly.