Games

If all of its games were available elsewhere, there would be a lot less switch users

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.

Saved you a click: "nO thEyre DiffErANT dEmoGraphiCS"

Easily. Aside from the first party titles, there's literally no reason to get a Switch 2. Everything else is objectively better on a PC handheld (especially the Deck).

Do people actually think its a competitor? This is just news sites trying to make something up for clicks surly.

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.

Yes because Steamdeck games are cheaper

Is a pants really a competitor for clothing?

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.

Think about what the parent is going to buy their kids a easy to use Nintendo console or the Steam deck that doesn't run every game you can buy on it because it's really a pc

After playing tens of games on the Switch people might want to play the tens of thousands of games on Steam.

I mean most games coming to switch outside of Nintendo themselves is already on or coming to steam deck.

Nowadays consoles don't really matter. Which is good for the users.

They're cheaper which is insane. We could see a boom if third party manufacturers hop on steamOS now

Is the switch 2 even competitive?

It's a hall pass to an ecosystem. It's barely hardware.

Well, the steam deck sold something like 6 million, and the switch sold 150 million, so....probably not? But on a more anecdotal level I know a lot of people for whom the Steam Deck took the place of their Switch.

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.

Betteridge wins again.

Handhelds are a niche in PC gaming. Especially in the whole gaming market.

I'd much rather buy a Steam Deck and run Switch emulation on it, knowing I can buy games a whole lot cheaper on Steam sales.

Honestly I prefer console to PC so much, even as a fediverse user, linux user, someone who has a degoogled phone and uses a home server instead of a cloud, because I just hate having to worry if games are compatible with my hardware, or if controllers are compatible with my game, or if graphical oddities in my game represent supernatural parts of the story or that I didn't install the right NVidia driver. When it comes to games, which are leisure, I find I just can't relax with PC games like I can with console games. As for emulation, I can't enjoy my games like that at all becuse the worry that settings are wrong or emulation is wrong is just too much like work. So I love my switch and I'll probably love my switch 2 one day.

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.

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.

I think we should be asking the question the otherway around as some games on PC handhelds could be cheaper and possibly run better, but that's just my opinion

Nintendo consoles are locked down, solely designed to force you to spend top dollar on the latest Bing-Bing-Wahoo games and late capitalism subscriptions so you can play with children and manchildren alike. You get the choice to buy BingKart Horizon for $80-90, or buy the old Switch 1 games again, full price, because they didn't want to bother releasing a 5MB update to unlock the framerates and resolution in the original ones. Nintendo wants more money, fuck you, pay more.

Steam Deck is effectively a gaming PC crammed into a handheld. It uses an open OS that you don't have to root, so you can install almost every game humanity has ever made, including all the previous Bing-Bing-Wahoos. You can get any of these games for FREE (if you're smart), or just wait for a fire sale held several times a year. We can vaguely count on someone eventually developing an emulator to work with Switch 2 games one day, saving everyone money in the long run, because those angel developers that operate against the wishes of corporate gaming cartel oppressors are the closest thing we have to Santa Claus and Jesus doing a fusion dance. The Steam Deck is how we forgive Gaben for never releasing HL3. Exclusively played by giga-manchildren.