Are PC handhelds like Steam Deck really competitors for Switch 2?
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Betteridge wins again.
Handhelds are a niche in PC gaming. Especially in the whole gaming market.
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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. Personally, I don't see a path for a Sony handheld to compete.
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"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.
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Is the switch 2 even competitive?
It's a hall pass to an ecosystem. It's barely hardware.
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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. 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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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They're cheaper which is insane. We could see a boom if third party manufacturers hop on steamOS now
They're NOT cheaper. There is exactly one cheaper PC handheld, and it's the base model of the LCD variant of the Deck.
And the reason for that is that Valve went out of its way to sign a console maker-style large scale deal with AMD. And even then, that model of the Deck has a much worse screen, worse CPU and GPU and presumably much cheaper controls (it does ship with twice as much storage, though).
They are, as the article says, competitive in price and specs, and I'm sure some next-gen iterations of PC handhelds will outperform the Switch 2 very clearly pretty soon, let alone by the end of its life. Right now I'd say the Switch 2 has a little bit of an edge, with dedicated ports selectively cherry picking visual features, instead of having to run full fat PC ports meant for current-gen GPUs at thumbnail resolutions in potato mode.
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Is the switch 2 even competitive?
It's a hall pass to an ecosystem. It's barely hardware.
You mean as opposed to the Steam branded Steam PC running the Steam OS that boots straight into Steam?
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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.
This is objectively wrong.
I mean, the PC market has grown, don't get me wrong. Consoles use to be the only thing that mattered and that's no longer the case. You can't afford to ignore PCs anymore.
But consoles still drive a majority of revenue for a majority of games, to my knowledge. And the Switch is a huge market by itself.
More importantly, PC gamers should be extremely invested in console gaming continuing to exist. Console gaming is a big reason PC gaming is viable. They provide a static hardware target that can be used as a default, which then makes it the baseline for PC ports. With no PS5 the only games that make sense to build for PCs are targeting integrated graphics and lowest-common-denominator CPUs. That's why PC games in the 2000s used to look like World of Warcraft even though PCs could do Crysis.
Consoles also standardized a lot of control, networking and other services for games. You don't want a PC-only gaming market.
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You mean as opposed to the Steam branded Steam PC running the Steam OS that boots straight into Steam?
Theoretically you can spin up a used thinkpad from a yard sale and run steam. Nintendo doesn’t (legally) run on anything that’s not Nintendo branded ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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They're NOT cheaper. There is exactly one cheaper PC handheld, and it's the base model of the LCD variant of the Deck.
And the reason for that is that Valve went out of its way to sign a console maker-style large scale deal with AMD. And even then, that model of the Deck has a much worse screen, worse CPU and GPU and presumably much cheaper controls (it does ship with twice as much storage, though).
They are, as the article says, competitive in price and specs, and I'm sure some next-gen iterations of PC handhelds will outperform the Switch 2 very clearly pretty soon, let alone by the end of its life. Right now I'd say the Switch 2 has a little bit of an edge, with dedicated ports selectively cherry picking visual features, instead of having to run full fat PC ports meant for current-gen GPUs at thumbnail resolutions in potato mode.
that model of the Deck has a ... worse CPU
We don't really know this. It very possible that the CPU will be trash. Nintendo's devices don't really support genres that require CPU power (4X, tycoon, city-builder, RTS, MMO etc.).
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that model of the Deck has a ... worse CPU
We don't really know this. It very possible that the CPU will be trash. Nintendo's devices don't really support genres that require CPU power (4X, tycoon, city-builder, RTS, MMO etc.).
Best we can tell this is an embedded Ampere GPU with some ARM CPU. The Switch had a slightly weird but very functional CPU for its time. It was a quad core thing with one core reserved for the OS, which was a bit weird in a landscape where every other console could do eight threads, but the cores were clocked pretty fast by comparison.
It's kinda weird to visualize it as a genre thing, though. I mean, Civ VII not only has a Switch 2 port, it has a Switch 1 port, too. CPU usage in gaming is a... weird and complicated thing. Unless one is a systems engineer working on the specific hardware I wouldn't make too many assumptions about how these things go.
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Theoretically you can spin up a used thinkpad from a yard sale and run steam. Nintendo doesn’t (legally) run on anything that’s not Nintendo branded ¯_(ツ)_/¯
And theoretically you can install Windows on a Steam Deck. Not making something specifically unsupported doesn't mean you're not building your business model around the default use case.
For the record, Nintendo games can be legally run on an emulator, much as Nintendo may protest this. It's a pain in the ass to do so without technically breaking any regulation, but it sure isn't impossible, and the act of running the software elsewhere isn't illegal.
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Yes because Steamdeck games are cheaper
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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 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.
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Best we can tell this is an embedded Ampere GPU with some ARM CPU. The Switch had a slightly weird but very functional CPU for its time. It was a quad core thing with one core reserved for the OS, which was a bit weird in a landscape where every other console could do eight threads, but the cores were clocked pretty fast by comparison.
It's kinda weird to visualize it as a genre thing, though. I mean, Civ VII not only has a Switch 2 port, it has a Switch 1 port, too. CPU usage in gaming is a... weird and complicated thing. Unless one is a systems engineer working on the specific hardware I wouldn't make too many assumptions about how these things go.
If you primarily play CPU bound games strategy games, you can very much make conclusive statements about CPU performance. For example, Cities in Motion 1 (from the studio that created Cities: Skylines), released in 2010, can bring a modern CPU to its knees if you use modded maps, free look and say a 1440p monitor (the graphics don't actually matter). Even a simple looking game like The Final Earth 2 can bring your FPS to a crawl due to CPU bottlenecks (even modern CPUs) in the late game with large maps. I will note that The Final Earth 2 has an Android version, but that doesn't mean the game (which I've played on) isn't fundamentally limited by CPU performance.
It very much is a genre thing. Can you show me a game like Transport Fever 2 on the Switch? Cities: Skylines?
The OG switch CPU was completely outdated when released and provides extremely poor performance.
The switch was released in 2017. It's CPU, the cortex A57, was released in 2012. It was three generation behind the cortex A75 that was released in 2017.
