Man, everyones jumping in onto the handheld gaming PC segment. Pretty cool. Hopefully it will light a fire under Nintendo's butt to do better with its hardware.
I think Nintendo knows it’s market pretty well. I have both a switch and a steam deck andO have a lot of the same games on each. The deck is obviously the higher power unit. I got it just a short time ago to try to play through my backlog, although to be honest I’ve logged more hours on new purchases like Stray and Dredge. It’s a good system.
The switch outshines it in a couple of places, though. First, they got the form factor - specifically the size and weight - better than steam did. It’s smaller and lighter, and I think the battery lasts longer. More importantly, the games that run on the switch were made for it. There’s no squinting at tiny fonts or trying to figure whether and how to use the trackpad to control the mouse bits. If it’s on the switch, I can be pretty sure it is playable on the switch. I’m still getting used to the issues with scaling down the desktop experience to a deck, but already I’m thinking I won’t be playing a lot of cyberpunk without booking up a mouse, keyboard, and monitor.
In short, the deck and windows handhelds need to perform at the level of a (low end) desktop (because they’re playing desktop games) as well as worry about scaling and transforming the UI. The switch doesn’t have that problem, and the trade off is a more limited (but still extensive) library.
The switch is my first Nintendo device since the NES, and the first party content isn’t what made me finally try it. I like playing games like Diablo on it. I think Nintendo, by owning the entire stack, can serve up a better and more curated experience. If I didn’t have a library of a couple hundred steam games that I’ve never played, I’d probably not have considered getting the deck. I am enjoying it, and some games are phenomenal, but from a performance-that-actually-impacts-the-user perspective, Nintendo might just come out on top.
Yet the sales figures show Nintendo have amazing sales.
PS2 - 159 million.
Nintendo DS - 154.02 million.
Nintendo switch - 125.62 million
Gameboy/ Gameboy colour - 118.69 million
PS4 - 117.2 million.
3 out of the 5 top sales belong to Nintendo. So regardless of hardware, Nintendo is a loved gaming system.
Whereas Xbox is number 9 on that list with the 360 at 85 million. So the console war seems to be between Nintendo and Sony at this point.
As happy as I am with my steam deck I love to see competition. I love portables all the way back from my game boy, game gear, all the way through to the vita.
I hope this new wave of high powered portables keep pushing each other to their limits so we see the best in our hands.
No thanks. We don’t need more closed and bloated spyware, what we need is more open and privacy respecing OSes like GNU/Linux and devices using it like Steam Deck.