PC gaming handhelds were one of my favorite trends of 2023, and that's because I'm a fairly ardent gamer. I've reviewed a ton of gaming handhelds here at XDA, including the Lenovo Legion Go, the Steam Deck OLED, the Asus ROG Ally, and the Ayaneo Kun. With more gaming handhelds around the corner, like the MSI Claw, I'm excited. Still, I feel like we're already reaching the "boring" stage of gaming handhelds with ubiquitous designs and homogenized feature sets.

To be clear, "boring" designs aren't necessarily bad designs. The Lenovo Legion Go even bucks this trend with its superb kickstand and detachable controllers, but the rest of the gaming handheld industry is, so far, more or less the same when it comes to design. Even the MSI Claw looks more or less exactly like the ASUS ROG Ally, with the biggest difference between the two being the Intel chip inside the Claw.

The Steam Deck started the trend; others perfected it

Companies went one of two ways

When it comes to PC gaming handhelds, it's hard not to attribute the explosion of the industry to the much-loved original Steam Deck. While these handhelds aren't a new phenomenon, the Steam Deck caused a massive cultural shift in PC gaming that widened the gap enough to allow other handhelds to succeed, too. The Steam Deck is pretty big and bulky, and while it's an excellent piece of hardware, that bulk was one of the easiest things for competitors to improve on. And improve they did.

The ASUS ROG Ally was the first mainstream Steam Deck competitor to reach the shores of the United States, and it was significantly smaller than Valve's own gaming darling. It had a better screen, a more powerful AMD APU, and was an easy sell over the Steam Deck for people who wanted more power in a smaller form factor. That same form factor later influenced a whole host of other gaming handhelds, notably the similarly-sized Ayaneo 2S and, as already mentioned, the MSI Claw.

There's one other way that companies went through, and that was to maintain a similar size profile but with a bigger screen-to-body ratio. The Ayaneo Kun and the Lenovo Legion Go are two examples of this: devices that max out the screen real estate as much as possible without compromising on hardware. As a result, you end up with gaming handhelds that are more or less as big as the Steam Deck, but with a much, much larger screen.

There are only so many ways to implement a controller with a screen

It's an inherently boring form factor

Going back to what I said earlier, boring design doesn't mean bad design. The best smartphones have been boring in their designs for a long time now, and foldable phones have been one of the few saving graces that have made smartphones interesting again. There are always fun concept designs being worked on, too, and I suspect that's how we'll see the PC gaming handheld industry go in the far future. The Lenovo Legion Go, for all of its faults, is my favorite gaming handheld from last year from a pure design standpoint. It did something differently, and I admire that a lot.

Thinking about it logically, though, how many ways can you really integrate a controller and a screen into one form factor? Companies have been doing this for a long, long time, and most gaming handhelds arguably resemble an upscaled PSP. Ayaneo is trying something a bit different with its designs regarding the Ayaneo Slide and the Ayaneo Flip. Still, it's unclear how those will even hold up from a practical standpoint. We've seen other companies enter the fold, too, with OneXPlayer trying something unique with the X1 and making what is essentially a tablet that can be morphed into different form factors. However, how good that actually is remains to be seen.

I'm excited to see companies pushing the envelope more and more, but as it stands, it's hard to envision what else companies could really try. Lenovo, OneXPlayer, and Ayaneo are all publicly trying new things to varying degrees of success, so I'm hopeful that they influence others in the space to try and push the boundaries of what a gaming handheld can be, too. Even still, the default go-to design of a PC gaming handheld will likely remain the same for a long time, with the biggest differences being in the underlying hardware.

As for why that is, I suspect the biggest reason is software. Windows is not exactly built to be deeply modified in the way Linux is, and companies using Windows have opted to build software around Windows rather than doing anything specific within Windows. Even Ayaneo's dual-screen, a Nintendo DS lookalike, seems to have a second display tacked. It's controlled by the company's AyaSpace software rather than something that Windows actually understands as a bottom display for touch inputs. We haven't seen much of it outside of the company's demo videos, though, so we can't say how seamless this integration feels.

What's next for handhelds?

Nevertheless, we'll be waiting to see what companies pull out next in terms of gaming handhelds. Many of them are going to continue to look the same and give similar user experiences, but it's the ones that do something different and unique that I'm most excited about. With the likes of Ayaneo growing as well, I suspect they'll eventually push the more mainstream competitors to do something different.