Winners and Losers: Razer’s Steam Deck rival appears while Stadia disappears

OPINION: It has been an incredibly busy week in the world of tech with loads of new product launches and of course the hallowed Trusted Reviews Awards 2022 taking place.

But as ever, in the sea of announcements for the team at Trusted Reviews there was one very clear winner and one very clear loser in the world of shiny things.

Here’s who they are.

Winner: Razer Edge 5G

This week gamers were given a rare treat with Verizon revealing the existence of a new portable games console from Razer.

The news broke after Verizon executives took the stage at Mobile World Congress in Las Vega to reveal the Razer Edge 5G handheld console.

The console is the latest in a long line of Switch-like games consoles, like the recently unveiled Logitech G Cloud.

However, what sets the Razer apart is that it already looks set to have much better specs than most of the rivals we’ve seen. The full specs haven’t been revealed but the key points are that, as well as 5G connectivity, the console will be “built on top of the Snapdragon G3X Gen 1 Gaming Platform and designed for high-performance gaming on the move”.

This means it should offer much better performance than the G Cloud, which runs on a mid-range 7-series Snapdragon CPU.

The addition of 5G connectivity means it’ll be much better for gaming on the go using cloud services like GeForce Now or Game Pass, which require a very fast data connection to work and are the only real way to get full fat AAA games to run on Android devices.

Loser: Anyone who uses Stadia

You may have noticed we didn’t mention one other “big” cloud gaming service in that list. Specifically, we intentionally didn’t give Google Stadia a plug.

The reason why is pretty simple: Google’s shutting it down. The tech giant confirmed the news on Thursday in a blog post, where it cited a lack of traction as reason for retiring it.

This means all content on the platform will be unplayable from January 18 2023. The only silver lining is that all hardware, game and add-on content purchases made through the Google Store will be refunded before then.

The news isn’t surprising given how fast Google stopped investing in Stadia, with it closing its newly formed exclusive game studio in February. Since then, it’s made next to no effort to market the service, or get exclusive games and features onto it.

But even so, considering the fact Stadia had such an impressive start, with its launch seeing big name games like Baldur’s Gate make their debut, it’s still a little sad to see it keel over so quickly.