Traditional Consoles Aren't The Future, Retro Handhelds Are

You would be hard-pressed right now to think of a recent week that’s gone by when anti-consumer practices from major video games companies such as PlayStation and Xbox weren’t making the headlines. Mass layoffs, studio closures, obscene price increases, the death of physical media; the list goes on.

The driving force behind all these corporate decisions is the obsession with seeing a number go up on a spreadsheet to appease boards of executives. Not to promote video games as art, but to pacify shareholders who are deeply invested in the financial success of the games industry, but not invested in those who make it happen. Parasites, leeches, any of several descriptive names that I probably shouldn’t print; people who panic because billions in profits just isn’t enough and never will be.

The truly daft thing is that logically, these decisions are going to have the opposite effect. Far fewer people are going to buy a thousand-dollar-plus PlayStation 6, especially when they have barely felt the value from the current generation. Xbox is dying a loud and agonising death because it went too big on buying Activision Call of Duty and has embarked on the biggest campaign of self-sabotage in video game history since. Yet it still chases unrealistic targets, like a billion users per day.

Retro Handhelds Are Closing The Gap To Consoles

Amidst all this, a relatively niche corner of the games market has seen significant growth, to the point where it has now broached the mainstream. Handheld consoles from China that were previously marketed as retro emulation machines are now being spoken of in the same conversations as the likes of the Steam Deck and Xbox ROG Ally.

Leading this are companies like Ayn, Retroid, and Ayaneo, whose offerings are growing more and more powerful with each new reveal. Where once these were devices used to play SNES, Game Boy, and PS1 games, they are now capable of far more. This is largely due to the pairing of Snapdragon’s Gen 8 and Elite systems-on-chips (SoCs) and Google’s Android platform, typically found in flagship mobile phones, which are powering handhelds like the Ayn Thor, Retroid Pocket 6, and Ayaneo Pocket series.

These high-end devices aren’t cheap. The Ayn Thor is currently selling for between $259 for the Lite model and $579 for the Max model with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD. Ayaneo’s prices are famously inflated, with its Pocket DS starting at $579. They’re also not immune to the RAMpocalypse either, with several price increases in recent months. But tellingly, they’re still being seen as better value than traditional consoles.

For the tech sickos amongst you, Ayaneo are also big into Windows handhelds, with its upcoming Next 2 peaking at a colossal $5,299. In fairness, it does come with 128 GB RAM and 2 TB of storage, and is powered by AMD’s most powerful APU (accelerated processing unit, a CPU and GPU on the same chip) to date - the Ryzen AI Max+ 395. Somehow, I don’t think this will be considered good value.

A huge reason for this is that they are relatively open-source platforms, with a cottage industry of app developers creating tools for everything from PC game emulation through the likes of GameNative and GameHub to PlayStation cloud streaming, without the need to buy a PS5.

Why spend a grand on a console when you can just subscribe to PS Plus for a month and play on a machine that costs half that? Throw in things like RetroAchievements and frontends like ES-DE, RetroHrai, or Cocoon, and you can have the same console experience, with more platforms covered, for less money.

Ownership Is Becoming One Of The Defining Topics Of This Generation

We're fast approaching the point where 'downloading something and sharing it to keep it alive isn't piracy. It's all we've got left.' aftermath.site/video-game-pir... — Aftermath (@aftermath.site) 2026-07-02T00:03:30.270812+00:00

The major elephant in the room is that of piracy. Emulators require ROMs, digital copies originally made from physical games, and often these are obtained from illegitimate sources. But as gaming becomes increasingly prohibitive for the average player, the uptick in ownership of these handhelds is no accident — and could even be perceived to be a protest.

A quick look at the many subreddits that have popped up around the handheld hobby shows more questions about “secret console” emulation — code for Nintendo Switch — and GameNative or GameHub compatibility than asking about old Amiga or arcade games. People are no longer just using these devices to reminisce or to preserve old games, but to actively replace current consoles.

It’s easy to understand why. More than once this week, I’ve seen social media content that calls into question the illegitimacy of piracy, and it’s directly linked to game ownership. We no longer own the games we spend a lot of money on, and companies are increasingly reminding us of that in their policies. The sentiment appears to be that if we no longer own the games that we buy, then piracy can’t be considered stealing.

As the director of a historical video game preservation institution, and someone who has dedicated his entire adult life to this cause, this is accurate. We have attempted to work with the industry's trade organization to find a legal path forward, but they refuse to offer a meaningful alternative. — Frank Cifaldi (@frankcifaldi.bsky.social) 2026-07-01T18:45:54.133Z

The handheld manufacturers undoubtedly see this and must be rubbing their hands in glee. They rely on the FOMO that a new, more powerful console offers to keep their business ticking along, given the propensity of hobbyists to collect these devices like candy. And with more powerful handhelds, more developers are emerging to work on cracking newer consoles for emulation.

If publishers can revoke access to games we spend a lot of money on, at any time and for any reason, then it’s just going to embolden people to lean more into alternative methods of procurement. It will be interesting to see where the market goes from here, both from a hardware perspective and given the likes of Sony, Microsoft, and others seem so hellbent on weakening support from gamers.

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