- cross-posted to:
- polygon@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- polygon@sh.itjust.works
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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.
Shit no, its a different market. The switch was designed by committee to extract the maximum amount of money possible from the consumer. The Steam Deck is geared toward PC enthusiasts and built and designed by those same people. They aren’t even in the same ball park.
Within an enthusiast bubble, PC handhelds are a big deal, but they do not exist in the same universe as Nintendo consoles.
I keep hearing this shit and it seems like stupid wishful thinking, because in a locked-down universe where Switch 2 is not a shitty proposition for way too much cash compared to getting a PC with 10k+ PC games from the get go and also emulating anything you wish because it’s your hardware and it’s just bits - in that universe, Polygon is a much needed pool of experts that people go to for advice instead of a source of stupid ragebait titles telling them a log of shit is the new snickers.
Nintendo will not have true competition in handhelds until its peers in the console space get involved.
Yeah, sure, fuck you Polygon
Saved you a click: “nO thEyre DiffErANT dEmoGraphiCS”
Gotta huff that copium. We need to pay 80 dollars for a ‘key card’
I really truly don’t think so. While there is some overlap, I would never give my 5 yo a steam deck and tell them to just figure it out. And on a steam deck, I’d be really sad to not have any Mario kart, Zelda, etc…
I don’t see the problem with having both- they fill different niches.
I don’t see the problem with having both- they fill different niches.
Money. Steam Deck OLED costs in my country €700, Switch OLED €350-360 and the Switch 2 will be around the €560-600.
steam deck, I’d be really sad to not have any Mario kart, Zelda, etc…
I’m so close on purchasing a Steam Deck OLED to game in weekends or in bed after full 5 days behind a desk job. But I’m always worried that these games won’t work well with emulations. I’ve been researching like crazy but keep reading different things.
And spending €700 with uncertainty is not my favorite thing to do.
Haha, I am researching like crazy as well. So far I came to the conclusion that I have 3 options:
- get a Steam Deck
- get a Lenovo Legion Go (more power but less battery life)
- wait and see what will Lenovo Legion Go 2 be like
So far I’m waiting. My current Switch isn’t going anywhere, but going forward I’m not going to spend much on games there.
I really doubt switch 2 games will emulate at all or well for quite some time.
I get the money argument. In that case, get the one that does more for you now now, and save up for the other one later. You don’t need them all at once.
I waited a year before getting the first switch, and almost 2 years for a ps4. I think I waited at least a year for all the other PlayStations too save the 5.
Getting something at launch isn’t all that great- bugs, limited games, max prices, etc… a year or so later and you get bundles and deals and lots of game choices.
I don’t have a deck- but a few of my friends do and I’ve played with it a bit- it’s great and I want one at some point, but I can wait for #2 to come out and then go on sale before I dive in.
Steam deck is definitely just as easy to use as the switch for playing and downloading basic games from the storefront. A 5 year old could absolutely use it easily with some games preloaded.
Its not specifically hard but its also not just as easy to use. I say this as someone whos been gaming on linux for over a decade now. You still run into issues here and there with proton(often a devs fault for bad code) and there is genuinely a lot more going on and tweakable on the steamdeck.
Steamdeck is a great device but Nintendo is good at making simple systems
The steam deck has way more potential, but CAN be just as simplr as only ever launching and downloading games through gaming mode. The parent downloads 5stean deck verified games and then all the kid has to do is use the joystick to switch between them. But then it also has the potential to be a learning experience or teaching tool as the kid grows. But the steamos gaming mode is dead simple to navigate and a child could definitely use it.
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).
I picked up a Nintendo Switch because of it being a handheld. I wouldn’t have picked one up otherwise, since I had skipped generations of Nintendo consoles preferring Sony due to Nintendo games being too high. But, with the Steam Deck where I don’t even need to repurchase “Deck versions” of games the handheld component isn’t a selling point of the Switch to me anymore.
It’s way too big for kids too.
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The Ally, Legion, Claw and Win 4 are all more expensive than the Steam Deck. The Odin 2 and Pocket 5 are not, but they don’t run steam, so you can definitely not play all the same games as the steam deck
Serious question. Do ANY of those have track pads? Because so far those seem to be something that only the deck has and I find them to be its most important feature.
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Reparability? Robustness? Software support? Community support?
It isn’t all about comparing performance numbers.
This is exactly why we have these issues like we’re dealing with with the Switch 2. Console gamers are only focused on hardware and exclusivity, they’re not focused on the operating system of the device, the build quality of the product itself (including the ergonomics), nor do they care about the company that produces it beyond their basic fanboy tendencies.
Steam Deck’s competitors might have slightly better hardware or a higher resolution, but none of them are right to repair friendly. None of them have custom software literally designed for the product, and none of them have the sort of ergonomics that the Steam Deck has. Not to mention the fact that Valve is an American company, which might not be important to everybody, but it is important to me. They’re also a company that has proven themselves to be largely consumer-friendly.
While I’m not dissing anybody who does make the choice to go for an Ally or a Legion Go, the problem I have is that those devices are literally just another hardware company jumping on a band wagon. The Steam Deck completely revolutionized the way that we play on PC. Sure, it took inspiration from the original Switch. There’s no question about that. But that doesn’t mean that Valve was just jumping on a band wagon the way that ASUS and Lenovo are doing.
Valve literally spent years working with Linux developers on software that makes Linux gaming truly viable in order to create devices that allow you to run virtually any game on a handheld that you fully own, are allowed to put any game on (including games from other launchers, which they didn’t have to allow) and you’re fully allowed to self-repair it if any issues arise. Meanwhile, companies like ASUS and Lenovo treat their customers more like smartphone
suckerscustomers, not to mention the fact that they went the cheap and easy route of just using Windows, which isn’t optimized for a device like these. And guess what? Lenovo is bending the knee to the Steam Deck supremacy by allowing you to get a version with SteamOS in the future. That alone proves that Valve is one step ahead of their competition.To summarize all that I said, the reason the Steam Deck is so good is not just the hardware, it’s not just the screen, it’s the fact that it’s a very capable device at the hardware level, combined with very, very good software and a very consumer-friendly company behind it all.
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You don’t lose functionality, you can use SteamOS like a laptop as well. Desktop mode literally puts you in a KDE Plasma desktop environment.
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Yep! When you open the Steam menu, you can access a full-featured desktop mode. It makes the device virtually limitless outside of the software issues you mentioned. And I agree entirely that it’s ridiculous to see these companies ignoring Linux the way they do.
Hopefully you enjoy your second try of SteamOS!
There are thousands of games that come out every year, even after filtering out the asset flips and hentai games. A handful of those will have kernel-level anti cheat that make them incompatible by design. Fewer still will be pushing minimum specs that are too hefty for the Steam Deck to handle. So the thousands of remaining games are your use case for the Steam Deck, which tends to be cheaper than its competition and comes with a better OS. A device like those Android ones are fine for emulation, but you’re not playing newer releases on it, and newer releases are far, far, far more than just AAA games with hefty system requirements; it’s also Mouse: P.I. for Hire, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, Warside, Descenders Next, Dispatch, and on and on.
Is a pants really a competitor for clothing?
Wouldn’t the switch (locked down) be pants and pc handhelds (anything) be clothing?
Yes? That’s the analogy. Did they flip it in the article maybe
Trick question, there’s no “a pants”
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.
Yes, when combined with the switch 1
I keep retyping what I want to say, but I think my feelings come down to:
- There are 150 million switch 1’s in the wild, that’s going to continue to be a massive pull for developers when porting new games.
- Many families may already have the switch 1, are the exclusives enough of a pull to encourage those people to upgrade?
I do think the switch 2 will do just fine, but I also think there are a lot of people who loved their switch 1 who might look at the games they played, and look at upgrading to a steamdeck instead of the switch 2.
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.
For some actual numbers, Valve had sold ~4 million steam decks since it was released over 3 years ago.
Nintendo has sold ~150 million switches to date. And they sold nearly 18 million of them in its first full year (2017).
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.
Yes, we need the Xbox handheld to fail, we don’t want Windows to take Linux’s best chance to grow.
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)
Nintendo published a list of games with compatibility issues. Says they are “continuing to improve compatibility, including by working with publishing and developing partners”, which implies they’re hoping to patch in fixes for affected games.
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?).
For Ring Fit and Labo, they’ve clarified that those games aren’t compatible with new JoyCons but can still be played with old JoyCons.
Also Lenovo is releasing a legion go that ships woth steam os. Thay will help push steam os development and adoptions.
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
This is what cracks me up about this topic literally every time it comes up.
Everyone on highly tech savvy and linux loving lemmy not being able to wrap their heads around the idea that busy parents dont want to have to tech support their kids game console. They want to be able to tell Grandma “He has a switch 2 and wants the new pokemon game for his birthday”, they want to walk into stores and buy accessories that WILL fit and they dont want microtransaction laden shit. One of the FEW things I still respect about Nintendo is that their AAA in house releases are FULL games (for the price, they would fucking want to be).
The 6 to 12yo market alone is probably enough to make the switch worthwhile from a business perspective. The “just tech savvy enough to work facebook” crowd adds in the profit margins.
Idiots who have never used a steam deck and are obviously scared by the word linux in this thread. You can easily use the steamdeck without ever leaving gaming mode and with absolutely no troubleshooting needed. Its as simple as browsing steam, pressing download, and pressing play. I would absolutely give it to a child with a few games preloaded, and they would be perfectly fine to use it. The UI is way more friendly than the switch one also. Everytime ive tried to play a game on switch with friends theres been some update that takes ages, the Ui is slow and clunky, and connecting joycons is an absolute pain. What troubleshooting do you think is necessary to run a game from steam lmao?
Yes but that group by in large won’t be buying a switch 2 for at least a couple of years. $450 per console plus $80 a game is brutal, especially if you’re buying for more than one kid.
On the other hand a switch lite can be had for like $100 and used games aren’t too expensive either. So for the price of a switch 2 you could get all 3 kids a switch lite + a game. No fucking brainer.
The sort of people who bought a switch at launch, after drinking Nintendo NX leaks like kool-aid, aren’t as impressed this time around. They’re also getting really pissed off at Nintendo’s behavior towards the emulation scene.
Lots of those people, myself included, will be getting a steam deck. A lot of us will also probably end up buying a switch later on after sales/price drops/cheaper revisions. The same time most parents will be snatching them up.
Lifetime sales won’t be affected nearly as hard, but I don’t know that the first year will be as big as the OG switch’s.
That being said if M$ can figure out a good UI for windows portables W/ Xbox integration that might make things even harder for them.
I think you’re definitely right about the adoption speed, people wont be dumping their switches en masse to buy a 2.
The Deck definitely puts a dent in their sales but “i DoNt gEt wHy aNyOnE wOuld bUy a sWitCh” comments on Lemmy show just how skewed the demographics are on here. Its not aimed at us.
If you try to buy a game on the deck that isn’t verified to run there you get a warning. Meanwhile you have a limited selection on the switch of over priced games.
Deck runs every game that you can easily buy on deck, and then some that you can’t
Do people actually think its a competitor? This is just news sites trying to make something up for clicks surly.
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.
I feel like that’s more of a preference than a competitor/competition though.
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.
What’s the difference?
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.
A surprising number of people in this very comment section seem to.
All of these comments here are also on lemmy so I don’t think that’s a comparable sample.
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.
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.
You can go on random comment section on internet, and people are starting new “console war” for Steam Deck vs Nintendo Switch.
No they are not mutually exclusive
Mine actually emulates switch games.
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 would’ve entertained this argument more in 2017 at switch’s launch, but smartphone gaming has not significantly eaten into console or PC gaming marketshares. Definitely not to the degree people were anticipating in the 2010s that’s for sure.
Yeah, you and @ampersandrew@lemmy.world have a point.
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.
Yeah I think that’s probably the case as well. Same reason there are tons of people who have both a switch and a steam deck. They do not fill the same role.
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.
Some people spend a lot of time, money in mobile games.
Occam’s Razor. I think it’s just the “default device” and placed in front of their eyes, so it’s what most people choose?
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.
Wow what a time warp. Yeah everyone legitimately worried the Xbone and PS4 were going to flop hard. PS4 did great, Xbone was respectable all things considered. It was such a concern that the demand to be cross generation hampered the development of DA: Inquisition and many other games because their publishers thought they were going to need to pick up 360/PS3 sales to bridge the gap in sales. Wild time - and talk about getting it wrong!
Direct input existed before xinput and works just fine
Yes because Steamdeck games are cheaper
And a lot of people already have hundreds of them
They won’t be cheaper for long…
Sure they will, Steam has sales all the time
