Are PC handhelds like Steam Deck really competitors for Switch 2?
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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.
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I swear, every time into one of these the Dunning-Kruger gets me.
I know it's coming, but it gets me anyway.
Keep telling yourself that!
You don't know anything about the Switch 2's CPU and you just assumed it will be better because "trust me bro".
And you have the gall to call other people stupid (note that I never insulted you) and in such passive-aggressive way too.
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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.
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OP claimed the Steam Deck's CPU was definitely worse than the Switch 2 (this was an explicit, categorical statement).
Considering the Switch's history (Cortex A57 used in the OG Switch being three generation behind in 2017), it's not unreasonable to speculate that the Switch 2 CPU is likely to be extremely weak from a gaming perspective (I never brought up compute or synthetic benchmarks).
Exactly what hardware at a similarly competitive price point and form factor are you comparing it to when you say it's behind?
The Switch 1 didn't use the very best top of the line parts that money could buy, but if that's what you're fixating on then you're missing the fact that neither did the Steam Deck. The Switch made compromises to hit a $300 price point in 2017, and the Deck made compromises to hit a $400 price point in 2022.
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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.
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).
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They took the Tegra because it was sitting in some Nvidia warehouse and they could get it for cheap, or at least get it manufactured for cheap. At least that's what the grapevine says about how that came together. It does fit Nintendo's MO of repurposing older, affordable parts in new ways.
I always get a kick of being called a Nintendo fanboy. For one thing, I don't fanboy. Kids fanboy, and I haven't been one of those in ages. I don't root for operating systems or hardware. I don't even root for sports teams.
For another, back when I was a kid I was a Sega kid. My first Nintendo console was a Gamecube. I was an adult at that point. As a teenager I had a Saturn. I stand by that choice to this day. Better game library than the Dreamcast. Fight me.
But that doesn't change what happened. The Wii U bombed extremely hard, but there was certainly something to the idea of flipping screens. The Switch is ultimately a tweaked Nvidia Shield and little else. The R&D around it clearly went into seamlessly switching the output from handheld to TV and the controllers from attached to detached. And you know what? They killed it on that front. People don't give enough thought to how insane it is that the Switch not only seamlessly changes outputs when docked, but it also overclocks its GPU in real time and switches video modes to flip resolution, typically in less time than it takes the display to detect the new input and show it onscreen.
It's extremely well tuned, too. If you hear devs talk about it, in most cases it takes very little tuning to match docked and handheld performance because the automatic overclock is designed to match the resolution scale.
The Switch didn't succeed (and the Wii U didn't fail) at random. Similar as some of the concepts at play are, the devil is in the detail. Nintendo sucks at many things, but they got this right. Competitors stepping into this hybrid handheld space ignore those details at their peril, and that includes the Switch 2.
At least that's what the grapevine says about how that came together.
This is when I stopped reading because this is demonstrably false. The 214 scratches the Cortex 53 cores and is semi-custom hardware. That also ignores the obvious deal to cheapen the Tegras, which was basically handing NVIDIA the Chinese market on a silver platter, which Nintendo really didn't cater at all...
AMD had nothing low power/long battery to offer but the jaguar at the time, so Nintendo had to deal with one of the most hated companies in order to get a competitive mobile chip, rather than doing it in-house with licensed off the shelf ARM chips like before. They took a page from SONY and went with a custom GPU based solution, but lacking a solid hardware department (AMD did a lot of the heavy lifting over the years) they just went with NVIDIA because there was almost no other game in town at that price (see Chinese market above, no one else was trying to get into streaming for the Chinese market and needed a strong game library).
That's it
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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.
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.
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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.
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Exactly what hardware at a similarly competitive price point and form factor are you comparing it to when you say it's behind?
The Switch 1 didn't use the very best top of the line parts that money could buy, but if that's what you're fixating on then you're missing the fact that neither did the Steam Deck. The Switch made compromises to hit a $300 price point in 2017, and the Deck made compromises to hit a $400 price point in 2022.
Portable devices using ARM CPU cores, even ones for ~$350, like the Xiaomi F1 released in 2018. It came with a new Snapdragon 845 SoC that included an Adreno 630 GPU.
It didn't have the form factor of the Switch, I will give you that. My point is that the Switch had a very weak CPU when compared to similar devices even in the same price band for its time.
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Considering this console comes after the Deck and the other handhelds, shouldn't be the other way around?
Btw to answer the question:
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Few exclusive titles (for now)
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Not great performance to some last year triple A game (like cyberpunk 2077)
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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, it could be a good choice.
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Portable devices using ARM CPU cores, even ones for ~$350, like the Xiaomi F1 released in 2018. It came with a new Snapdragon 845 SoC that included an Adreno 630 GPU.
It didn't have the form factor of the Switch, I will give you that. My point is that the Switch had a very weak CPU when compared to similar devices even in the same price band for its time.
It didn't have the form factor of the Switch
So it's not a similar device. Comparing to phones is rather misleading, given that phones do not have active cooling and wouldn't actually be able to run the kinds of games the Switch hardware could without catching on fire in the process. They aren't gaming 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.
Direct input existed before xinput and works just fine
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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!
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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, it could be a good choice.
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.
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Do people actually think its a competitor? This is just news sites trying to make something up for clicks surly.
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Do people actually think its a competitor? This is just news sites trying to make something up for clicks surly.
A surprising number of people in this very comment section seem to.
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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).
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)
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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 first party titles. For all other games, Steam Deck is better because the games don’t cost $80, mods work, etc.
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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.
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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)
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?).
