Can the Subor Z+ turn the tide of China's declining console gaming market?

The gaming fraternity knows that the Xbox One and PS 4 gaming consoles offer a 4K gaming experience that can easily confuse you given the specs of these consoles.

For instance Microsoft’s Xbox One X, which doesn’t really have any impressive specs under the hood. If the Xbox One X ran a standard version of Windows with standard Windows games, you can expect a slow, laggy gaming experience.

In fact, if you open-up the Xbox One X, you’ll find most of its components are standard PC parts. So, what’s stopping manufacturers from putting more powerful PC components in a console. We’re not really sure.

But a Chinese company is doing just that. Enter Subor Z+.

The Subor Z+ is a Chinese gaming console that functions as a PC with a full version of Windows installed. The console features two USB 2.0 ports on the front and four USB 3.0 ports on the back, an Ethernet port, two HDMI ports, an S/PDIF connector and lastly one 3.5mm jack for audio and another for the microphone.

On the bottom, the Subor Z+ has two 2.5-inch drive bays that house a 128GB SSD and an optional 1TB Toshiba mechanical drive. The console is powered by a custom AMD Ryzen SoC with 4 cores and 8 threads at 3.0 GHz and a Vega-based GPU with 24 CUs at 1300 MHz along with 8GB of SGRAM.

You can also use the Subor Z+ console out of Windows mode, in a special console mode, but the update is yet to release later in this quarter. This begs the question, why the whole console mode, why not just play games on Windows?

It’s simple, just like an Xbox One, the Subor Z+ only has 8GB of GDDR5 RAM that is shared. A considerable chunk of that RAM will be eaten up by Windows OS which will significantly lower-performance on AAA Titles. The other less-obvious reason is DRM (Digital Rights Management).

So, what’s the use of having a Subor Z+? Gaming consoles had been banned entirely in China since the year 2000, despite laws being eased since then, console gaming still hasn't made any real major headway in the Chinese gaming market.

Gaming consoles make up for only 0.4 billion dollars of the approximately USD 22.1 billion Chinese gaming market. Subor’s move of attempting to combine a console and PC gaming experience into one could just be an ingenious move to capture an almost non-existent market.