There’s a lot here, and yes, the total addressable market for the Steam Deck is currently less than either Switch will sell in a single quarter, but the video game market is a very different thing now than it was in early 2017. The Switch was the only game in town; now it’s not. Live service games make up a significant amount of what the average consumer wants, and those customers largely play on PC for all sorts of reasons. The Switch 2 is no longer priced cheaply enough that it’s an easy purchase for your child to play with, abuse, and possibly break. The console market in general is in the most visible decline it’s ever been in, also for all sorts of reasons, and those handhelds from Sony and, at least, Microsoft are likely to just be handheld PCs as well.
Development on blockbuster system sellers has slowed way down, which comes hand in hand with there just not being as many of them, which makes buying yet another walled garden ecosystem less appealing. This walled garden has Pokemon and Mario Kart, so Nintendo’s not about to go bankrupt, but if we smash cut to 8 years from now and the Switch 2 sold more units than the Switch 1, I’d have to ask how on earth that happened, because it’s looking like just about an impossible outcome from where we stand now.
Also, there’s this quote:
But, although Microsoft has now been making Xbox consoles for over 20 years, it has consistently struggled to use that experience to make PC gaming more seamless, despite repeated attempts
Look, I’m no Microsoft fanboy. Windows 10 was an abomination that got me to switch to Linux, and Windows 11 is somehow even worse. The combination of Teams and Windows 11 has made my experience at work significantly worse than in years prior. However, credit where credit is due: Microsoft standardized controller inputs and glyphs in PC games about 20 years ago and created an incentive for it to be the same game that was made on consoles. It married more complex PC gaming designs with intuitive console gaming designs, and we no longer got bespoke “PC versions” and “console versions” of the same title that were actually dramatically different games. PC gaming today is better because of efforts taken from Microsoft, and that’s to say nothing of what other software solutions like DirectX have done before that.
Still, the reason a Microsoft handheld might succeed is because it does what the Steam Deck does without the limitations of incompatibility with kernel level anti cheat or bleeding edge software features like ray tracing (EDIT: also, Game Pass, the thing Microsoft is surely going to hammer home most). Personally, I don’t see a path for a Sony handheld to compete.
live service games make up a significant amount of what the average consumer wants, and those customers largely play on PC for all sorts of reasons
You are leaving out the elephant in the room: smartphones.
So, so, so many people game on smartphones. It’s technically the majority of the “gaming” market, especially live service games. A large segment of the population doesn’t even use PCs and does the majority of their computer stuff on smartphones or tablets, and that fraction seems to be getting bigger. Point being the future of the Windows PC market is no guarantee.
I don’t think the people gaming on smart phones are the same demographic that would compete with the Switch 2 or a handheld PC. It’s not a lot of data, but take a look at how poorly Apple’s initiative for AAA games on iPhone has been going. There are more problems with that market than just library. The PC market has been slowly and steadily growing for decades while the console market has shrunk.
I am vastly oversimplifying a lot, but… Perhaps mobile gaming, on aggregate, is too shitty for its own good? It really looks that way whenever I sample the popular ones.
I suspect it’s more that the time people can and do spend playing phone games has just about zero overlap with PC games. You play phone games while on the bus or on the toilet, you play PC games while at home behind your desk.
I think a huge reason so many people with a Steam Deck also have a Switch is that the Switch had a 5 year head start. Hades did really well on Switch, but I can’t imagine anyone choosing that version of the game if they had a Steam Deck, and the same applies to Doom, The Witcher 3, etc. I have a Switch and a Steam Deck, but I haven’t used one of those machines in years.
Really wild to go from this vibe at the end of the seventh generation of consoles to the one we’re at now. For me, and many other people that like high quality gaming experiences, mobile games have completely vanished.
“In a sense, Nintendo is the victim of its own strategic foresight. With the Switch, it was the first to spot that the narrowing gap in processing power between mobile and at-home devices had enabled a unification of handheld and home gaming experiences.”
I was out after this. This is patently wrong. Crucially, Nintendo capitalised on the failure of the vita using the exact same strategy but with a caveat: 3rd party memory cards.
The PSVita had the power to play former gen games in a compact format and MUCH better connectivity than the switch. It failed on the stupid memory cards. Nintendo did not. That’s pretty much it. Sony had the AAA handheld market with the PSP and blew it. I’d be very surprised if something like this wasn’t uttered by an MBA regard in sony’s corpo structure:
“If we divide our playerbase between handheld and dedicated living room console too much it will damage our business”.
So instead of capitalising on a massive library of games that could easily have been ported to a handheld format (the PS4 had 1,4TFlops, we’ve surpased that on mobile before the PS5 launched) SONY decided to double down on AAA and subsequently in live service games, and here we are…
If someone can create a handheld AAA console is a team lead by mark cerny with the support of AMD. To this day I don’t know how we end up with PS portal instead…
So here we are, Sony carved out a niche (AAA and fidelity) from the Nintendo handheld success, and just decided to sit on their hands with it. There was exactly 0 foresight from Nintendo. They knew from the beginning the living room was lost to either MS or Sony to begin with.
Nintendo got to the Switch via the Wii U and through the realization that they could package similar hardware with affordable off-the-shelf parts and still drive a TV output that was competitive with their "one-gen-old-with-a-gimmick" model for home consoles.
It was NOT a handheld with AAA games, it was a home console you could take with you. That is how they got to a point where all the journalists, reviewers and users that spent the Vita's lifetime wondering who wanted to play Uncharted on a portable were over the moon with a handheld Zelda instead.
So yeah, turns out the read the article has is actually far closer to what happened than yours, I'm sorry to say.
Yes, that’s why they took an ARM based Tegra (like the vita with the powerVR from imagination tech) unlike the in-house wiiu tech… Why look at evidence when we can ignore it and just BS to defend my fav plastic box maker…
Also, the WiiU is basically the PSP remote play in one package, 6y later…
C’mon man, do Nintendo fanboys really have to ape Apple fanboys for everything. Next thing you’re going to tell me how palworld should be sued to the ground…
They took the Tegra because it was sitting in some Nvidia warehouse and they could get it for cheap, or at least get it manufactured for cheap. At least that's what the grapevine says about how that came together. It does fit Nintendo's MO of repurposing older, affordable parts in new ways.
I always get a kick of being called a Nintendo fanboy. For one thing, I don't fanboy. Kids fanboy, and I haven't been one of those in ages. I don't root for operating systems or hardware. I don't even root for sports teams.
For another, back when I was a kid I was a Sega kid. My first Nintendo console was a Gamecube. I was an adult at that point. As a teenager I had a Saturn. I stand by that choice to this day. Better game library than the Dreamcast. Fight me.
But that doesn't change what happened. The Wii U bombed extremely hard, but there was certainly something to the idea of flipping screens. The Switch is ultimately a tweaked Nvidia Shield and little else. The R&D around it clearly went into seamlessly switching the output from handheld to TV and the controllers from attached to detached. And you know what? They killed it on that front. People don't give enough thought to how insane it is that the Switch not only seamlessly changes outputs when docked, but it also overclocks its GPU in real time and switches video modes to flip resolution, typically in less time than it takes the display to detect the new input and show it onscreen.
It's extremely well tuned, too. If you hear devs talk about it, in most cases it takes very little tuning to match docked and handheld performance because the automatic overclock is designed to match the resolution scale.
The Switch didn't succeed (and the Wii U didn't fail) at random. Similar as some of the concepts at play are, the devil is in the detail. Nintendo sucks at many things, but they got this right. Competitors stepping into this hybrid handheld space ignore those details at their peril, and that includes the Switch 2.
At least that’s what the grapevine says about how that came together.
This is when I stopped reading because this is demonstrably false. The 214 scratches the Cortex 53 cores and is semi-custom hardware. That also ignores the obvious deal to cheapen the Tegras, which was basically handing NVIDIA the Chinese market on a silver platter, which Nintendo really didn’t cater at all…
AMD had nothing low power/long battery to offer but the jaguar at the time, so Nintendo had to deal with one of the most hated companies in order to get a competitive mobile chip, rather than doing it in-house with licensed off the shelf ARM chips like before. They took a page from SONY and went with a custom GPU based solution, but lacking a solid hardware department (AMD did a lot of the heavy lifting over the years) they just went with NVIDIA because there was almost no other game in town at that price (see Chinese market above, no one else was trying to get into streaming for the Chinese market and needed a strong game library).
That’s it
Edit: regarding output switching… You must be using an apple phone and never heard of MHL… Jesus… It’s like with Apple fans, shit exists for a decade but they honestly think it was Apple that came up with it. M8, and let’s not start with the joycons, they are pretty shit, prone to failure and the design is so garbage that even Nintendo spent R&D not to use that trash sliding mechanism again…
I would recommend continuing to read, then. Or re-reading. None of the detail you provided contradicts what I said at any point.
In fact, the ultimate takeaway is exactly the same. Feel free to substitute all that detail at the point where you "stopped reading" and keep going from there. It's as good a response as you're going to get from me.
Although, since you're going to be anal about the historical detail, it's incorrect that Nintendo "didn't cater at all" the Chinese market, they had a presence there through the iQue brand all the way up to the 3DS and these days they ship the Switch there directly through Tencent. I wasn't in the room to know what the deal with Nvidia was. I have to assume the Shield ports were both low hanging fruit and some part of it, but I seriously doubt it was a fundamental part of the deal to not compete with them there, considering that it took them like two years after the Switch launch and just one after they stopped running their own operation to partner up with Tencent. You'd think "handing the Chinese market on a silver platter" would include some noncompete clause to prevent that scenario.
In any event, we seem to agree that Nvidia was the most affordable partner that could meet the spec without making the hardware themselves. So... yeah, like I said, feel free to get to the actual point if you want to carry on from there.
The Vita had far more problems than just memory cards. You came very close to identifying what the real problem was, Sony couldn't sustain supporting two separate platforms at once. And conversely, Nintendo unifying onto a single platform was what saved the Switch.
Theoretically you can spin up a used thinkpad from a yard sale and run steam. Nintendo doesn’t (legally) run on anything that’s not Nintendo branded ¯_(ツ)_/¯
And theoretically you can install Windows on a Steam Deck. Not making something specifically unsupported doesn't mean you're not building your business model around the default use case.
For the record, Nintendo games can be legally run on an emulator, much as Nintendo may protest this. It's a pain in the ass to do so without technically breaking any regulation, but it sure isn't impossible, and the act of running the software elsewhere isn't illegal.
Yes but the act of dumping a game or acquiring it in any capacity is illegal (circumventing DRM measures) as well as running the game (which also requires circumventing DRM measures)
I will acknowledge that when it's tested in court. And I mean internationally.
The notion that copyright is absolute as long as the content is hidden behind any and all DRM is nonsensical, as is the assumption that literally any function not enabled to the user on purpose is illegal to use. I suspect the reason nobody has had to really defend that softmodding their console and dumping their owned keys and carts is legal is that no game maker, Nintendo included, wants to see how that goes in any way that would set a precedent.
I mean the hardware is at least decent. And they aren’t shitting out another one because they aren’t seeing the generation improvement in performance they wanted (its coming). If I buy a Steam Deck, I at least get capable hardware.
Nintendo last several generations of hardware are born anemic. They start behind where even close to the cutting edge is. Nintendo has long since gave up pushing any kind of interesting boundary with its hardware.
I can’t just download “SwitchOS” and throw it on some non-anemic hardware to get a decent experience.
As much as people want to project onto Steam the idea that its a walled garden, its not. It is a cultivated garden, but its not walled off. You can enter and leave freely.
I legitimately thought you were talking about Nintendo hardware there for a while.
As far as we can tell the Switch 2 seems like it's a bit ahead of the Deck, which is on the low end of the current batch of PC handhelds anyway. I don't think the quality of hardware is the differentiating factor here, one way or the other. I also don't think "anemic" was what the Switch felt like at launch. It was somewhere between the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One, which was only slightly inadequate for a home console and incredibly bulky for a handheld in 2017. "Not pushing any interesting boundary" is somewhere between extremely opinionated and outright incorrect, quite frankly.
I have to say, it's a bit surprising to see all the hostility from... I don't know who this is. PC master race bros? Steam fanboys? You'd think that last group at least would have some fondness for the Switch, given it effectively invented the entire segment of modern hybrid handhelds. Not that I have a horse in that race, there are pros and cons of both, I own both and I think both are pretty great. The Deck effectively replaced the Switch on my rotation, then it got replaced by a Windows handheld and I assume the mix will lean slightly more towards the console end when then Switch 2 comes out, then swing back when newer PC handhelds come out. I am fine with that.
I find the last point interesting, though. What IS a "cultivated garden" platform? I don't know that I think of Steam in those terms at all. Steam is a software platform that just happens to be tied to someone else's hardware and OS and seems very unhappy about it. From the perspective of a PC user I think Steam's dominance is a problem. For one thing because my storefront of choice is GOG (screw DRM, thanks) and for another because the entire point of an open platform is competition. From the perspective of a console user Steam is... well, not that. It's a PC gaming thing, so I don't see it as direct competition in the fist place. Which I guess is why I'm more weirded out than anything else to see people taking sides this aggressively.
“Not pushing any interesting boundary” is somewhere between extremely opinionated and outright incorrect, quite frankly.
I mean its not. Nintendo, in ancient history, did actually push boundaries around hardware. Most console makers did. The switch did not represent that. The completely transformed their approach to hardware, to shift to weaker, cheaper hardware so that they don’t push themselves out of reach for their target market: children.
The steam deck was a real advance in that regard. The handhelds that have followed have also pushed further. That’s not at all what the Switch2 is. Its behind the starting point for things that were available a few years ago.
The hostility is that Nintendo products have developed from actually capable, latest capabilities things, to a ticket you need to have punched to play a brand of games. The franchised is being carried by fan-boy-ism, not anything that they are doing that are objectively good, or that advance the industry. Its annoying also, that they are constantly being white knighted.
It seems like you are mostly concerned about grinding your axe against steam.
I'm confused. The article you linked seems to very clearly agree with me:
In terms of performance, the Switch 2 is clearly more powerful than the Steam Deck before we even start talking about cooperation with NVIDIA, DLSS upscaling, and tighter game optimizations possible when developing for a fixed console hardware platform.
I mean, yeah, that tracks and is verifiable. It's a more power hungry APU (although admittedly on a larger node), it has more cores on both the CPU and GPU side, a higher resolution and framerate screen. Storage seems to fall somewhere between the cheaper and more expensive Deck models and, while it has less memory it's also... you know, a console, so there's presumably less overhead and the RAM itself is a bit faster, which is very relevant to APUs. The Switch 2 is built on Ampere, while the Deck is on RDNA 2. Both launched in 2020, but I think it's not controversial to say that Nvidia had the edge on both features and performance for that gen.
It is absolutely true that Nintendo traditionally latched on to older, less performant components paired with hardware investment elsewhere, but the Switch was a huge outlier there. If you consider it against handhelds it stood alone as the single most powerful one. Granted, the Vita was the closest comparison and that was a whole generation behind, but I can't stress enough how outclassed it is against the original Switch. The need to push a TV display from a mobile chipset ended up making the Switch a genuinely beefy handheld.
The Switch 2 is interesting because besides iterating on that requirement it also seems like a very deliberate response to the Deck and PC handhelds. It seems intentionally designed to be competitive against the current set of those. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Nintendo pushed the price and performance up a bit specifically for that reason, frankly. It seems egnineered specifically to not feel outdated at launch, even if it will presumably be outclassed again in a couple of years.
And for the record, I'm not "white knighting" Nintendo. They're famously ruthless, litigious and quirky bordering on unreasonableness. Not white knighting (or grinding an axe against) Valve, either. They're also ruthless and quirky bordering on unreasonableness, although clearly much, much better at PR with core gamers. I am actively hostile towards Nintendo's approach to a number of things (primarily emulation) and to Valve's approach to a number of things (primarily their gig economy approach to game development and their monopolistic tendencies). Not rooting for one of them doesn't mean I'm rooting against either of them, or that I don't acknowledge the things they do well or poorly.
I mean, the PC market has grown, don't get me wrong. Consoles use to be the only thing that mattered and that's no longer the case. You can't afford to ignore PCs anymore.
But consoles still drive a majority of revenue for a majority of games, to my knowledge. And the Switch is a huge market by itself.
More importantly, PC gamers should be extremely invested in console gaming continuing to exist. Console gaming is a big reason PC gaming is viable. They provide a static hardware target that can be used as a default, which then makes it the baseline for PC ports. With no PS5 the only games that make sense to build for PCs are targeting integrated graphics and lowest-common-denominator CPUs. That's why PC games in the 2000s used to look like World of Warcraft even though PCs could do Crysis.
Consoles also standardized a lot of control, networking and other services for games. You don't want a PC-only gaming market.
With no PS5 the only games that make sense to build for PCs are targeting integrated graphics and lowest-common-denominator CPUs.
Are we just ignoring all of the PC-exclusive games PS5 players will never get to play? And the games that were PC-exclusive until their success prompted a console port? The PC catalog dwarfs the PS5 catalog by hundreds of modern titles, and thousands if you count retro games. Steam (just one of the PC software distribution platforms) added over 14,000 games in the last year and there are fewer than 3,500 PS5 games in total. I can tell you that "targeting integrated graphics and lowest-common-denominator CPUs" has never really been a priority in the PC space; you can see this trend even before consoles like the SNES existed.
That's why PC games in the 2000s used to look like World of Warcraft even though PCs could do Crysis.
A lot of PCs couldn't do Crisis. It was a hardware seller because a lot of people significantly upgraded just to play it. Games in the 2000s looked like that because highly-detailed 3D polygonal models used too many resources (mostly CPU at the time). It made more sense, for developer and user, to limit the polygon count for everyone's sake.
Even in the modern day, World of Warcraft is an MMO and the textures and other assets are deliberately less detailed to optimize performance, so this isn't really a fair comparison and doesn't really demonstrate that consoles prop up the PC market (especially since WoW wasn't available for consoles during the peak of its success and was also a hardware seller due to that exclusivity). It's like comparing Plants vs. Zombies and Half-Life 2, or Destiny and Alien: Isolation.
A lot of PCs can't do a lot of games. That is precisely the point.
If you look at the Steam hardware survey at any given point in time, mass market GPUs are typically mid-range parts two to three generations old. And even then, those are still the most popular small fractions of a very fragmented market.
The average PC is an old-ass laptop used by a broke-ass student. Presumably that still is a factor on why CounterStrike, of all things, is Steam's biggest game. It sure was a factor on why WoW or The Sims were persistent PC hits despite looking way below the expectations of contemporary PC hardware.
The beginning of competent console ports in the Xbox 360 era revolutionized that. Suddenly there was a standard PC controller that had parity to mainstream consoles and a close-enough architecture running games on a reliably stable hardware. Suddenly you didn't need to target PC games solely to the minimum common denominator PC, the minimum common denominator was a console that was somewhat above average compared to low-end PCs.
In that scenario you can just let people with high-end hardware crank up resolution, framerate and easily scalable options while allowing for some downward scaling as well. And if that cuts off some integrated graphics on old laptops... well, consoles will more than make up the slack.
Sure, there are PC exclusives because they rely on PC-specific controls or are trying to do some tech-demoy stuff or because they're tiny indies with no money for ports or licensing fees, or because they're made in a region where consoles aren't popular or supported or commercially viable.
But the mainstream segment of gaming we're discussing here? Consoles made the PC as a competitive, platform-agnostic gaming machine.
The average PC is an old-ass laptop used by a broke-ass student. Presumably that still is a factor on why CounterStrike, of all things, is Steam's biggest game.
It's because of the high percentage of players from developing countries, countries where high-end electronics aren't accessible, or countries with weak economies. Russia, Brazil, etc.
It sure was a factor on why WoW or The Sims were persistent PC hits despite looking way below the expectations of contemporary PC hardware.
When Sims 4 came out, people upgraded. They cancelled Sims 5 so Sims 4 remains, with largely the same specs. That's not something consoles can change. WoW is similar, which is why there's no WoW for PS5.
The beginning of competent console ports in the Xbox 360 era revolutionized that. Suddenly there was a standard PC controller that had parity to mainstream consoles and a close-enough architecture running games on a reliably stable hardware.
That's because Microsoft owns Windows and Xbox, not because Xbox revolutionized gaming. They had the ownership of 2 platforms with significant lock-in. It's like if Nintendo owned both the Switch and PlayStation (which they almost did lol).
Sure, there are PC exclusives because they rely on PC-specific controls or are trying to do some tech-demoy stuff or because they're tiny indies with no money for ports or licensing fees, or because they're made in a region where consoles aren't popular or supported or commercially viable.
So there are 14,000 titles new to Steam in the last year and your conclusion is that they are all either keyboard-only, tech demos, indies, or from a poor nation? Wild. You just said that the Xbox controller opened up a new world over 10 years ago and yet you also believe that these new games just aren't usable with a controller?
You are all over the place here. I'm not doing quotes, either, it's an obnoxious way to argue online.
In no particular order: No, it's not just developing countries on older hardware (although there ARE significant markets where high end hardware is less popular, and they matter). Microsoft doesn't own Windows, Valve owns Windows, at least on gaming, as evidenced by the long string of failed attempts from Microsoft to establish their own store on Windows PCs. The standard controller was part of that, but it wasn't all of it. And yes, most of the 14000 titles on PC are tiny indies that sold next to zero (or actually zero) copies.
Valve runs steam as a gig economy app, there are very few guardrails and instead very strong algorithmic discoverability management tools. Steam has shovelware for the same reason Google Play has shovelware, Steam is just WAY better at surfacing things specifically to gamers.
Incidentally, most of these new games support controllers because the newly standardized Xinput just works. Valve has a whole extra controller translation layer because everything else kinda doesn't and they wanted full compatibility, not just Xbox compatibility because the blood feud between Gaben and Microsoft will never end, I suppose. None of that changes that it was the advent of XInput and Xbox 360 controller compatibility that unlocked direct ports, along with consoles gradually becoming standardized PCs.
No, it's not just developing countries on older hardware
I was talking about Counter Strike specifically, because you used it as an example.
Microsoft doesn't own Windows
They literally do. Look it up. Windows is developed and maintained by Microsoft. They own all trademarks and intellectual property related to Windows.
Valve runs steam as a gig economy app, there are very few guardrails and instead very strong algorithmic discoverability management tools. Steam has shovelware for the same reason Google Play has shovelware, Steam is just WAY better at surfacing things specifically to gamers.
I never disputed this, but you are arguing that PC games are all shit for some reason or another unless they're ported either from or to PS5.
Incidentally, most of these new games support controllers because the newly standardized Xinput just works.
Newly standardized? Xinput was created in 2005. It has "just worked" for ages, because it is officially supported by Microsoft through Windows. Because they own Xbox, Xinput, and Windows.
Valve has a whole extra controller translation layer because everything else kinda doesn't and they wanted full compatibility
So that they can support other controllers that aren't Xbox...
You're talking out of your ass here and not even paying attention to context which you yourself brought up. Not to mention you aren't even aware of why Xbox had such stellar support (Microsoft is one of the largest tech companies in the world and own the PC OS with the largest market share by a longshot) and how that support translated to the modern rise of PC gaming.
I never disputed this, but you are arguing that PC games are all shit for some reason or another unless they're ported either from or to PS5.
Wait, that's what you think you're arguing against?
No wonder this conversation is so loopy, then.
The fact that consoles are a huge asset for PC gaming doesn't mean, and is nowhere near the same as, saying that "PC games are shit unless ported directly from the PS5". Your straw man is not just subtly misrepresenting my point, it's having some entirely unrelated conversation in a different room with a different person.
Consoles get to be a massive asset for PC games without... well, whatever that statement is supposed to imply. PC games benefit a LOT from having a set target for mainstream hardware be a fixed point for five to ten years. They benefitted strongly from access to a large volume of affordable, standardized, compatible controllers (these days things have been that way long enough that the standards aren't going anywhere, but it was a massive deal in 2005, which is the period we're talking about, despite your surprise that we're talking about it). And yes, the target for PC-only gaming today would be both different and significantly less pleasant without those things. The shift to a more PC-centric market already made it so that ten-year-old games dominate the landscape.
It's not just CounterStrike. It's Fortnite, Overwatch, GTA 5, Minecraft, Roblox. PC gaming's characteristics encourage those types of forever games targeting widely accessible hardware. Consoles existing in parallel open the door to additional viability for AAA releases targeting higher end specs. Not that you wouldn't get any of those without consoles, but for the past 20 years consoles have been a big reason that's a whole genre instead a one-in-a-generation thing you'd get when an engine company wanted to flex its tech muscle for potential engine licensors and accidentally made a game in the process.
There’s some overlap in customers, sure but the vast majority of people who buy a Switch 2 aren’t the types who would buy a Deck. Switch 2 will sell tens of millions more units to a mainstream consumer. And that’s fine. Deck can still be a successful product in its own right as long as Valve is making a profit off of it through Steam software sales.
The Deck is targeted squarely at enthusiasts. While it's a fantastic product for that niche, anyone who thinks it's going to capture a market the size of Nintendo's any time soon is living in a fanboy bubble.
Hell, right now Valve isn't even capable of manufacturing half as many Decks as Nintendo will manufacture Switch 2s. They literally can't sell that number because they can't produce that number.
Maybe it’s from huffing too much copium; but I think that Valve’s eventual Steam Deck successor will probably have mainstream console levels of appeal.
By that point in time, compatibility should be nigh-sorted (thanks to all the hard work currently happening), and users won’t need to interact with the Linux desktop mode at all. It would be completely transparent, and only enthusiasts and power-users would ever want interact with it.
The biggest thing going for the SteamOS platform is the immense library that it brings forward; no other console can compete with — even with full backwards compatibility (which even the Switch2 is struggling with).
Probably not the Steam Deck successor alone, but the PC handheld ecosystem as a whole might be able to get there at some point (preferably mostly running Linux).
Though it’s kind of insane how much progress was already made over one generation: It went from a Kickstarter grift (Smach-Z), to the Steam Deck, to multiple competitors already.
Eventually, perhaps. I do not claim to have a crystal ball powerful enough to peer decades into the future. But right now, for this generation, I can say we're a long way from that point just yet.
What is it about backwards compatibility that the Switch 2 is having issues with? I thought it was all games that brought their own hardware, or depended on a feature that the new Switch doesn’t have (IR camera on the Joycon for example)
From my understanding, even though they both run Nvidia-designed ARM processors - there are enough differences between the two SOCs that a direct 1:1 translation is not possible for all titles, and those will need to go through an emulation layer.
Additionally, there are certain titles won’t be compatible due to hardware changes (Ring Fit Adventure for example, and probably all of the LABO stuff?).
Even if you own a Steam Deck, Nintendo has some attractive value. Nintendo essentially has a monopoly on at least 3 genres of videogame. The entire library of Steam doesn’t really have a casual racing game that can go toe-to-toe with Mario Kart. The same can be said for almost any Mario game. Even if a Steam Deck had the games, you’d need 2 decks or an extra controller to get the Switch-style experience. Valve isn’t really trying to compete with the Switch on its own turf.
This is very true. It's not just that Nintendo makes good games, it's that a lot of their games are wildly unlike anything else on the market. The reason I'm losing my mind over a Kirby Air Ride sequel is because there hasn't been any other game like the original from 2003. I've waited 22 years for another game that could scratch that itch.
Considering this console comes after the Deck and the other handhelds, shouldn’t be the other way around?
Btw to answer the question:
Few exclusive titles (for now)
Not great performance to some last year triple A game (like cyberpunk 2077)
The damn price of the games
The answer is: Yes. Any decently performing handheld right now is a better alternative. RIGHT NOW. In a year, with more exclusive titles and ( let’s hope) better game prices, who knows.
Yeah. I’m 100% who Nintendo is trying to lure with this launch, and honestly I’m a little ticked off about it–I’ve really wanted Metroid Prime 4 for a long time, but now it’s coming out and I have to choose between playing an inferior version or shelling out over $500 to play the good version. ($450 for the system, $80 for the game, and compatible SD cards in sizes larger than the internal storage of the new system don’t even exist yet.) So I’m inclined to wait, and see if there are enough good games to justify the Switch 2 purchase eventually, but they’re going to count that as poor initial sales for Prime 4. It might kill the franchise. Replaying some of my switch titles with upgraded performance might have been enough to motivate me to make the move, but they’re also going to charge extra for that. That’s…not great. Nickle-and-diming on top of a much more expensive system with even more expensive games is just ugly.
It definitely has me thinking about getting a PC handheld instead. A lot of what I was picturing was second-screen gaming while watching TV or YouTube, and the Deck is definitely a competitor in that space. There are a bunch of people saying that “oh, the reason you buy a Nintendo system is to play Nintendo exclusives,” which, yeah, that is a selling point, but for the original switch, just being a portable system that played modern games was also a selling point. That second factor is absolutely going up against the Deck, and frankly losing, because Steam has everything. Switch 2 has to go all in on the exclusives, and that’s a much tougher sell, especially since they don’t have the gold mine of good games nobody had played that they had from the Wii U to pad the release schedule.
Maybe they’ll amaze me, but I see them being very unhappy with the revenue from this console in a couple of years, and casting about for stupid shit to blame. And I think they’re gonna blame Metroid. It’s not Metroid, guys. Metroid is great. It’s the pricing.
At the time I’m writing this there are 78 comments in this comment section. I haven’t read all of them, so let’s just assume that every single one of those comments represents a unique individual who believes that the Switch 2 and the Steam Deck (and related) are direct competitors.
Given the nature of this platform and community that number is not even remotely surprising. It’s also an utterly insignificant number of people.
The overlap between people who would buy a Switch 2 and people who would buy a Steam Deck is a tiny sliver of a Venn diagram. Those are two largely separate categories of gamer.
I think this more people mistaking people expressing their preferences for a system and extrapolating that to meaning market share predictions.
Reword the question to do you believe Steam Deck will overtake Nintendo market share and you’d get different answers. Same with if you ask someone why is Linux better than Windows versus do you believe Linux can overtake Windows market share?
I find people on the internet have a hard time differentiating between people who are expressing preferences and people predicting market share shifts. People just see oh this person doesn’t like Nintendo or Windows and must believe Steam Deck or Linux is going to be more popular.
I typed out the below as a response to you, then reread what you wrote. We might be making the same point just with different words. Hopefully I’m not coming across as overly adversarial.
I think most people on social media, including lemmy, exist in an echo chamber that amplifies specific views to the point that it becomes easy to think those views are much more broadly held then they actually are.
Changing the question around like you suggest might help some people realize that, but I also think that there are a lot of people who think that the views expressed in their slice of social media are actually indicative of broader trends.
I also don’t think I’m immune to this effect, but I do feel somewhat compelled to point out specific instances of it when I notice it.
What I wrote might have been confusing, but I was trying say that places like lemmy may have view points that express preferences that aren’t representative of the mainstream. Like how there may be more positive Linux comments on average per user.
But, that it doesn’t necessarily mean the people expressing those views believe them to be representative of the mainstream. It is more just them expressing their thoughts.
However, people I found across social media can mistake what are simply individual opinions as general proclamations, and immediately jump to “Oh this person is claiming that their view point is one most people hold. What a bold claim.” When all they were saying was I like turtles as opposed to most people like turtles.
I’d say its more people stating why they prefer the Steam Deck over the Switch than actually believing the Steam Deck would overtake the Switch. Challenge them to a bet and you’d see very few take it.
I think it is people mistaking people’s preferences for market share predictions.
I gave away my switch to a coworker because i didn’t really like it to buy a steam deck. So i’d say for me yes they where competitors. I use a lenovo legion go now.
Depends on what you are after. Plenty of people are just looking to game, without anything specific in mind. Also plenty of people might see the real difference, want both, but only have the money for one. In these cases I would say that they are competitors as the buyer is contemplating which of the two to buy.
Honestly for me it came down to where i prefer to buy my games. Steam games will follow me for the forseeable future and switch games will not. I gave my coworker my nintendo account too with over $500 of games on it and i was like that’s it. That’s enough sunk cost that i will lose.
Steam Deck will not be able to compete with Switch 2 for first party titles since it can barely emulate Switch games at a decent frame rate. Will likely need a proper gaming PC to emulate S2 first party titles. For all other games, Steam Deck wins because the games don’t cost $80, vastly bigger selection, mods work, etc.
No they’re aren’t competitors. I’d wager a significant portion (probably the majority even) of Switch users have never heard of the Steam Deck or even less so the other handhelds.
Steam Deck has it’s fans but like everything in life just because you love it doesn’t mean the majority of people have any clue about it.
I think to the “early adopter” crowd, the people like me who where huffing Nintendo “NX” leaks back in 2016, the more “core” audience of people from the ages of late teens to however old James Rolfe is now.
Those people will probably buy a steam deck before a switch 2. There are a lot of them.
Though not as many people as there are like my ex-sister-in-law and her new bf who put together have four kids. The Linux PC I built them to make sure their kids had a good puter is enough trouble, even with me to help. I don’t see them even considering them for their kids.
That being said I also think many of those people will stick to their current console until they release a cost reduced “switch 2 lite”.
Buying a new $450 console for every kids plus $80 games is fucking brutal and most parents won’t put up with that shit when a used switch lite is like $100-150.
I see this hitting their initial sales a lot more than their sales over the new consoles life span, especially as people who chose steam deck, and the parents who waited, slowly grab a switch 2 during sales/price drops.
polygon.com
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