Saved you a click: “nO thEyre DiffErANT dEmoGraphiCS”
Gotta huff that copium. We need to pay 80 dollars for a ‘key card’
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).
Yes everything is better on a handheld PC. But the Deck is not a very good handheld PC. It is priced to be at the same tier as contemporary handheld PCs like the Rog Ally, the Legion Go, The MSI claw, the GPD Win 4, but all those handheld PCs can play current AAA titles while the Steamdeck is so underpowered that it struggles to emulate PS3 games. There are more recent devices that can play the same catalog as the steamdeck but cost a lot less, are more portable, and are just better built like the Odin 2 or the Retroid Pocket 5. At this point I am not sure what the use case is for the deck anymore. Every thing that the Deck can do, there are other devices that do it better and for less money.
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.
The Legion Go has a track pad, also the controllers detach and the right side controller can be used as a mouse
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.
Honestly I prefer console to PC so much, even as a fediverse user, linux user, someone who has a degoogled phone and uses a home server instead of a cloud, because I just hate having to worry if games are compatible with my hardware, or if controllers are compatible with my game, or if graphical oddities in my game represent supernatural parts of the story or that I didn’t install the right NVidia driver. When it comes to games, which are leisure, I find I just can’t relax with PC games like I can with console games. As for emulation, I can’t enjoy my games like that at all becuse the worry that settings are wrong or emulation is wrong is just too much like work. So I love my switch and I’ll probably love my switch 2 one day.
Hello fellow kids, I, too, can not enjoy my steam deck video game PC. I prefer to pay my tithe to Nintendo, my best friend and surrogate parent. I love [Product].
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.
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
Imagine if you could go on the Nintendo store and buy a game you couldn’t even run, or had to check a third party website to see if it ran acceptably and let you use all the buttons.
If you try to buy a game on Deck that you couldn’t run on Deck, there will be very clear warning about it, one you can’t miss. At least it was last time I checked. And to be honest, I’m pretty sure the number of games like that is now almost exclusively consists of competitive shooters, and you wouldn’t even thinking of buying it on Deck anyway.
Steam also has like the most generous return policy for video games ever
How is that different from any other computer buying from steam, ever? In the history of all computer games? A steam deck is a hand held computer with a community large enough, and system specs stable enough to have a rating on potentially any PC, and most Nintendo games in existence. Compared to nintendo’s walled garden. Your comparing apples to oranges.
It’s not different. Nintendo’s target group just don’t want to bother with it.
How is that different from any other computer buying from steam
To begin with, Nintendo Switch isn’t “any other computer” where you can “buy from Steam”, so this question seems irrelevant to this discussion.
My comment is germane to the post comparing the two devices in an aspect that exemplifies how they can’t be compared, and tries to spin it as a negative, while attempting to bury its positive.
The fact you say that the switch is not like any other computer is both true in the sense that i already argued, and false in that it IS yet just another computer, but with a walled garden.
If there was any a comment that was irrelevant, it would be yours.
I’d much rather buy a Steam Deck and run Switch emulation on it, knowing I can buy games a whole lot cheaper on Steam sales.
I think we should be asking the question the otherway around as some games on PC handhelds could be cheaper and possibly run better, but that’s just my opinion
A lot of people are saying they’re not really competition judging off sale numbers but I’d say they are, just PC handhelds aren’t that big of competition. They still are taking away sales as I doubt people with a steam deck are also gonna own a switch or switch 2 unless they already had one before the steam deck came out or are well enough off to afford both and don’t want to deal with emulating. I definitely get Lemmy and myself are a biased audience but I think arguing they’re not competition at all is wrong, they’re just not very big competition compared to Nintendo.
It largely depends on what you want out of a game system. Currently, no not really. Nintendo is a closed environment with no alternative platforms for the games, and their games are very family friendly and widely popular. Steam Deck is just a portable option for PC games, and therefore has to share its customer base with PC gamers.
I mean with emulation you can play a lot of Switch games on the steam deck so that does let you get around the closed ecosystem.
Switch 1 emulation on the Steam Deck already has much worse performance than a Switch, given the overhead of emulation. There is no possible way it can run Switch 2 games.
I wouldn’t say much worse performance, really depends on the game you’re trying to run. Based on what I’ve seen online ToTK is maybe slightly worse depending on the place you’re at while a lot of other games match or even exceed switch 1 performance. Combine that with all the dumb shit Nintendo is doing around upgrade packs and making you pay to get better performance and I’d rather go with the free option, since it’s gonna keep being worked on and get better and better. As for Switch 2 games that definitely might be a bit more rough at first but all we can really do with those is speculate until the console is out. Might take a bit for emulation to become available readily for those games but again with all the dumb things Nintendo is doing right now I’d rather wait then reward them for it. Plus by then there might be a new Steam Deck Gen or more PC handhelds from other companies that can compete with the Switch 2.
Do people actually think its a competitor? This is just news sites trying to make something up for clicks surly.
You can go on random comment section on internet, and people are starting new “console war” for Steam Deck vs Nintendo Switch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Also Lenovo is releasing a legion go that ships woth steam os. Thay will help push steam os development and adoptions.
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.
Yes because Steamdeck games are cheaper
And a lot of people already have hundreds of them
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 S2 first party titles. For all other games, Steam Deck wins because the games don’t cost $80, vastly bigger selection, mods work, etc.
The real question is: Do I care? And the answer is no. No I do not.
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.
I think to the “early adopter” crowd, the people like me who where huffing Nintendo “NX” leaks back in 2016, the more “core” audience of people from the ages of late teens to however old James Rolfe is now.
Those people will probably buy a steam deck before a switch 2. There are a lot of them.
Though not as many people as there are like my ex-sister-in-law and her new bf who put together have four kids. The Linux PC I built them to make sure their kids had a good puter is enough trouble, even with me to help. I don’t see them even considering them for their kids.
That being said I also think many of those people will stick to their current console until they release a cost reduced “switch 2 lite”.
Buying a new $450 console for every kids plus $80 games is fucking brutal and most parents won’t put up with that shit when a used switch lite is like $100-150.
I see this hitting their initial sales a lot more than their sales over the new consoles life span, especially as people who chose steam deck, and the parents who waited, slowly grab a switch 2 during sales/price drops.
