Would you say AMD is "shitting the bed" by not building it's own consoles too? You know AMD could build a kick-ass console since they are doing the heavy-lifting for the Playstation, and the XBox[1] , but AMD knows as much as anybody that they don't have the skills to wrangle studio relationships or figure out which games to finance. Instead, they lean hard in their HW skills and get Sony Entertainment/the Xbox division do what they do best.
1.and the Steam Deck, plus half a dozen Deck clones.
This is a case-specific example of failure, it doesn't generalise very well to other markets. AMD is really well positioned for this very specific opportunity of historic proportions and the only thing holding them back is a somewhat continuous stream of unforced failures when writing a high quality compute driver. It seems to be pretty close to one single team of people holding the company back although organisational issues tend to stem from a level or two higher than the team. This could be the most visible case of value destruction by a public company we'll see in our lifetimes.
Optimistically speaking maybe they've already found and sacked the individual responsible and we're just waiting for improvement. I'm buying Nvidia until that proves to be so.
Even Steam Deck is only a success, because it depends on Windows ecosystem, and the moment Microsoft decides it is enough, lets see how long it holds.
All the games that matter are Windows games running via Proton, as Valve has failed to actually build a GNU/Linux native games ecosystem, in spite of UNIX/POSIX underpinnings of Android NDK, PlayStation, the studios hardly bother.
The day Microsoft actually decides to challenge Proton, or do a netbooks move on handhelds with XBox OS/Windows, the SteamDeck will lose, just like the netboooks did.
Additionally, it is anyone's guess what will happen to Valve when Gabe steps down.
Everyone is quite curious what Microsoft will drop at CES 2025, and which OEMs will be on their side, it is going to be netbooks all over again.
I've been on both sides of this shitshow, I've even said those lines before! But I've also been in the trenches making the broken shit work and I know that it's fundamentally an excuse. There's a reason why people pay 80% margin to Nvidia and there's a reason why AMD is worth less than the rounding error when people call NVDA a 3 trillion dollar company.
It's not because people can't read a spec sheet, it's because people want their expensive engineers training models not changing diapers on incontinent equipment.
I hope AMD pulls through but denial is _not_ the move.