The Future is Now: Are We Reaching Handheld End-Game?

As I sit here in my office chair typing these words, I can spin my chair around and stare at the ridiculous situation sitting on the workbench behind me. There sit the AYN Odin 2, AYN Odin 3, Retroid Pocket G2, and the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally. Looking at that scene of amazing devices all together sent a flash of thoughts through my mind, but none more pronounced than that one worry of any niche hobbyist: are we reaching the endgame?

What was born out of a COVID lockdown desire to reconnect with the games of our youth has grown at seemingly impossible levels over a relatively short few years. It wasn’t so long ago that we were focusing on whether a handheld had enough Oomph to properly run Yoshi’s Island on SNES. Now I’m playing PS3 and modern PC titles natively on my devices. With so few hurdles left to be cleared, I can’t help but start to wonder where we go from here.

Modern Devices Are Redefining the Gaming Landscape

In the weeks leading up to the arrival of my shiny new AYN Odin 3, I realized just how well the Odin 2 had served me over the previous two years. Despite moving through dozens of other devices in the time since I first picked up the Odin 2, nothing else had really replaced it as the crowned king of my collection.

I pondered if the Odin 3 could offer enough to warrant the upgrade…It did. It does. Just as Ban pointed out in his Odin 3 review, it plays everything I ask it to. If there is something that it actually can’t manage locally (haven’t found much yet), I have a bevy of local and cloud streaming solutions ready to fill any gaps.

With the current crop of modern handhelds, almost nothing is off the table. Be it via emulation of entire gaming libraries, FEX PC translation for access to titles on GOG and Steam, streaming, or native Android gaming, the majority of video game history is now accessible via a single device.

And it isn’t limited to Android. The Steam Deck and ROG Xbox Ally are Linux and Windows native devices, respectively, and both offer nearly limitless play options for most anything a gamer could want.

As handheld/console hybrid systems rapidly become the norm vs the innovative, where else is there left to still go? What hurdles are left to clear? Sure, PS3 emulation is still coming along from a development standpoint, and PS4 is still likely a ways off.

But short of those and any eventual Switch 2 emulation, I’m beginning to have a hard time imagining anything I can’t do with my current crop of handhelds. As a community, it’s fair to say that we’ve been eating good. The whole retro emulation part? That’s a checked box at this point.

As fantastic as the Odin 3 may be (and it truly is fantastic in my eyes), the Retroid Pocket G2 I’d picked up only about 6 weeks earlier was a fraction of the price, and still capable of playing the vast majority of demanding gaming experiences I’d want. And despite the brilliance of the G2, it’s already about to be overshadowed by the upcoming release of the new Retroid Pocket 6.

A device, which I’m sure will be great, but I don’t know that I’ll be able to find a reason to convince myself that I need one. I just don’t know what it would offer that I don’t already have, and that can’t be lost on manufacturers as they try to navigate this new tech crunch.

Retroid Pocket G2 | DirectRetroid Pocket G2 | GGG

Choice Paralysis Can Come In Many Forms

The idea of choice paralysis is a familiar concept to anyone who has ever had a hard time picking a game from a full ROM library, or even more commonly, picking out a movie or show in a massive streaming library. This is only getting more complicated as capable devices continue popping up. These days, deciding how and where you’d like to play a game is almost as large a decision as picking the title out itself.

It’s this console or ecosystem choice paralysis that I often find myself struggling with today. When I recently decided that enough was enough and it was time for me to finally play Hollow Knight, I had too many options. I’m willing to bet that my problem wasn’t unique, either. It turns out that over time, I’d accumulated Hollow Knight in both my Steam Library and in physical form on Switch.

Now, should I play the cartridge on my Switch OLED? Do I play it natively via Steam on my Deck or ROG Xbox Ally? Am I entitled to install the Android APK floating out there on the internet because I already own the game in multiple other places? Should I stream the game via Xbox Game Pass, either from my local console or the cloud?

Now, these are certainly an indication that I have too much, but as brands like Xbox become less and less discernible landscapes from the world of PC, and compatibility keeps improving across the board, it’s likely to become an industry-wide affliction.

In the end, I’ve been playing it via Switch emulation on my shiny new Odin 3, but I easily could have done the same in some way on a bevy of other devices. The fact that I’ve actually settled on something and started playing is a bit of a miracle in itself.

Innovation Via Cost Restrictions?

The AI boom has fully taken over the PC components market. This is our new reality, and it isn’t going to change in the immediate future without some major market condition swings. The explosion of RAM, GPU, and now even HDD prices is not only putting a damper on future console release windows but is actually increasing the cost across the board on older systems.

PS5 and Xbox systems both saw price increases in 2025, and those are consoles that are supposed to be approaching the end of their life cycles. The Nintendo Switch 2 launched at higher-than-anticipated prices. This isn’t going away soon.

Given the conditions of the market and the massive amounts of power that are already readily available, I think there’s actually potential to see some exciting developments in the next year or two. Developers and publishers have increasingly relied on brute force power to make games run at the levels gamers are looking for. Without a steady supply of increasingly powerful hardware in rigs, this model becomes unsustainable.

Technology is often at its most exciting to me when things are accomplished with hardware that may have been previously thought to be impossible. That could be something like FEX running PC games on Android natively, or the developers at Rare achieving the graphically impossible with Donkey Kong Country on the SNES hardware back in the 90s. Recent projects like Lossless Scaling highlight how developers can extract more performance out of aging hardware.

The implications of this shift are far-reaching. As costs reach near astronomical levels for basic components, it simply isn’t realistic for manufacturers to keep pushing new tech if there isn’t anyone around to afford them. “Do more with less” is a mantra that will ripple through the gaming industry just as fast as it has with other legacy consolidated media. Larger projects will increasingly be met with stricter budgets and smaller staffs.

AYN Odin 3 (Direct)AYN Odin 3 (AliExpress)

What’s Ahead?

The maturation of modern emulation handhelds and the cost limitations brought on by outside market forces make for a bit of a perfect storm. I have no doubt that we will continue to see the release of new devices throughout the landscape, but the all-out arms race may begin to slow.

Back when we were all chasing that PS2 and Gamecube emulation as something of a handheld brass ring, it made sense to continue to upgrade devices as things continually became more capable. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to say that in the near future. There just isn’t that much meat left on the bone.

A likely outcome as devices get more expensive is simply that people will hang on to the solutions that they already have. Given that even the mid-shelf offerings these days are wildly capable, it’ll certainly make for an interesting year that tests both the ingenuity and creativity of market players and gamers alike. If there’s one thing this community has always excelled at, it’s getting the most out of existing devices, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.

AYN Odin 3 (Direct)AYN Odin 3 (AliExpress)

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