They’re as good at it as the operating system is, if you think about any time you’ve ever plugged an external monitor into a laptop. There is some Valve special sauce in the software to help with that on Steam Deck, but I don’t think it’s something that would have gone uninvented without the Switch.
Define “easily”. The Steam Deck doesn’t come with a dock. They’re all just personal computers, and as such, they don’t need to be explicitly designed for certain functionality in many cases. Plus, I’d argue one of the core pillars is that it plays the same games at home and on the go, without having to purchase a second portable version of it.
Well, the first GPD Win beat the Switch to market by two years, so I’d be willing to bet it was inevitable. The GPD Win 2 was wildly impressive at the time, coming in at almost Switch level performance, but it could play my Steam games, and I bought one immediately, even at twice the MSRP of the Switch. I’m an earlier adopter for this kind of thing, but I do believe it was just a matter of the tech catching up. Up until that point, the power level of handheld stuff was always woefully behind what home consoles and PCs could do, and now that may still be the case, but we’re still happily playing games that require no more power than what a PS4 can do, which is tech from 12 years ago.
You’re making an argument that I am not. I never said the 3DS or its games weren’t successful; in fact, I said it was more successful than the Wii U, which likely led to the Switch being a logical thing for Nintendo to do. I never said its biggest games were ports. But while that 4.26M copies is no slouch, it’s in line with how Echoes of Wisdom or the remake of A Link to the Past have performed and not the 30M+ copies that Breath of the Wild sold. The former have smaller budgets and less mass market appeal (though it would be wildly impressive for just about any other series). They are the B games to Breath of the Wild’s or Tears of the Kingdom’s A games. That’s what handheld libraries typically were, especially up until the point that it was clear that the Wii U was a dud.
To use another example that will maybe help convey my point better: The 3DS got Hey! Pikmin. The Wii U got Pikmin 3.
Not an adaptation or port, but the Link Between Worlds compared to the console’s Breath of the Wild. Say what you will about the subjective quality of each of those games, but the market at large would prefer Breath of the Wild. Plus Sony’s catalog had this problem even more visibly on Vita.
I don’t know how much of that was needing to prove that the market existed rather than the simultaneous development of performant and power efficient x64 APUs suitable for handheld gaming PCs. The 3DS was plenty successful even at the time, but handheld-only games had a reputation for being the B game to the home consoles’ A game. It was a pretty natural conclusion for Nintendo, when their handheld was successful and their home console was not, to combine the two, using the same tech found in cell phones, no less.
I don’t know where your preferences lie, but by the numbers, far more games are coming in under the Steam Deck specifications in terms of system requirements than there are games that are stretching them or exceeding them. Very few companies can afford to make a game that runs poorly on it. If we look at the top 12 highest-reviewing games on OpenCritic for 2025 so far, I think only 1 of them (Monster Hunter Wilds) doesn’t meet the spec, and at least 3 or 4 of them are 2D with a retro aesthetic. All that to say, I think the horsepower ought to be enough for most people for a very long time, barring a minimal number of games.
There are a lot of edge cases. You have to handle external launchers, external error prompts; basically anything that requires you to Alt+Tab. One of the things Valve did a decade ago was the stuff that got rolled into GameScope that ensures that they never lose focus of the game window. Even with the resources to transform Windows this way, it will still take time.
GaaS means you have ongoing expenses after launch in a way that normal games do not. The costs are higher, but they keep chasing the much larger reward that only a super small percentage will ever achieve.
I think the mismanagement comes from thinking that any fighting game can keep up with the cadence and business model of League of Legends. You’ll see this again with 2XKO, even if they’ve got a year’s worth of character releases already done ahead of time to give them a head start.
The cast is playing high schoolers, right? If they’re re-recording audio at all, wouldn’t it be better to get people in their 20s, at the most, rather than in their 40s?