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.
The real question is: Do I care? And the answer is no. No I do not.
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.
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.
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.
After playing tens of games on the Switch people might want to play the tens of thousands of games on Steam.
If all of its games were available elsewhere, there would be a lot less switch users
"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.
Nah, this is pretty bad analysis.
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.
Betteridge wins again.
Handhelds are a niche in PC gaming. Especially in the whole gaming market.
No, they are successors.
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