AyaNeo Next is set to take on Valve’s Steam Deck

Details have been revealed for the AyaNeo Next, which appears to be a premium competitor to Valve’s Steam Deck.

The AyaNeo and the Steam Deck share some apparent similarities. Both are portable PCs using a central screen encompassed by joysticks, d-pads, and buttons. Both devices can also be plugged into peripherals and be used as PCs in the same way as desktops.

However, as reported by PCGamer, the AyaNeo Next appears to be a considerable step up in hardware from the Steam Deck and comes with a step up in price.

Currently, the AyaNeo Next is being sold for roughly £1000, compared to the Steam Deck’s £569 at its highest price point. The Steam Deck at that price comes with 512GB of NVMe SSD storage, while the Next boasts a 2TB NVMe SSD. The Next is also running a Zen3 Ryzen 5800U processor and has 16GB of RAM.

The AyaNeo Next has an estimated delivery of the end of February, shortly after the Steam Deck, which is planned to begin shipping next month.

Last month ProtonDB announced that the Steam Deck is now compatible with 80 per cent of Steam’s top 100 games. The team tests Valve’s Proton compatibility layer against Steam’s library of games. So far, only 10 per cent of the top 100 are entirely unplayable, while others function to various levels of success. Currently, Destiny 2 and New World are unplayable, but these are online games and may have developer blocks against Proton, but this is unconfirmed.

In other news, SEGA has promised to avoid NFTs if there is a push back from the community. CEO Haruki Satomi said, “We will consider this further if this leads to our mission ‘Constantly Creating, Forever Captivating’, but if it is perceived as simple money-making, I would like to make a decision not to proceed.”