At this point I'd be hard pressed to consider this over my Steam Deck. We will see the specs later but I doubt it will really compete processing-wise or screen-wise.
The openness (full arch desktop) of the Steam Deck is also awesome while having a great UI that you never have to leave if you don't want to.
EDIT: I mistakenly called it "fedora desktop", my bad
For the last few generations (since the Wii), you don't buy a Nintendo for the processing power. They haven't competed on processing power since the Gamecube. After the Gamecube generation, you bought a Nintendo for the exclusive games and that was it. Mario, Pokemon, Zelda, and others. Nintendo knows that their draw is just the games, and uses a lot of lawyers to make sure that normal gamers can't play those games on the Steam Deck. If you want to play what Nintendo has to offer on the Steam Deck you have to install an emulator and Nintendo has made sure that normal people would rather drop $300 on a Switch instead of risk legal issues.
Edit: I suppose that some people would also say the intuitive controls (motion control introduced on the Wii, dual screens (and touchscreen) on DS and WiiU, and detachable controllers on the Switch) have some draw, but those features have often been under-utilized except on a few titles.
I agree with you, for most people the Switch is the better/easier option if they are just looking to play a Nintendo-exclusive. Emulators aren't that difficult to set up on Steam Deck and you can easily launch the games from the Steam UI but nothing beats the plug and play of the Switch and double-y so if you are playing networked games.
This take is correct as the primary measure.
Its certainly why I bought one!
However computing juices really started to matter to me since that first buy …8 years ago? Ive been told this by other switch owners too. Some xplatform games get ported to switch and do end up being worse. Witcher 3, which ive beaten on switch, was repurchased on PC to play over steamlink because the switch was slow/choppy/lossy. Switch1 was precovid. Id imagine that many of us now want BOTH. Great content and great specs
The Steam Deck (which I have and love) is also far from a great experience docked, though I'm hopeful that a lot of those edges get ironed out over time.
I also wouldn't give my young kids a Steam Deck, but they will definitely be getting the Switch 2.
Nintendo does not compete on specs. They rely on the fact that fun is pretty much orthogonal to bleeding edge graphics.
They use that awareness and take advantage of simpler graphics to trade off processing power for features (portability, novelty) and profit (60>=usd games).
From time to time they also remind us that little hardware can do a lot if it's not running Chrome on a trench coat, and instead care is put in optimising things.
This is a pretty important point, and one that I'm mystified that a lot of people seem not to agree with. It doesn't matter if you're playing on a glorified smartphone with thumbsticks if the game is good enough. Moreover, having a selling point of state-of-the-art graphics today will turn into a _disadvantage_ in 5-10 years when newer games look even better; something designed to look good today with "lower quality" graphics is going to hold up better because it already is being compared to stuff taking advantage of every ounce of the latest save greatest hardware.
That's true, but Nintendo's counter to that is exclusive games, and they have big series like Mario, Zelda, Smash Bros. There's also newer ones that are more niche, but at least for me it's just the game where some new Smash Bros character comes from.
With exclusives games, emulation can be a problem, but many Nintendo games also rely on the novel things on their platform. For instance the Mario Party series has always tried to use something (rumble, mic, touchscreen, controller's shape).
This makes it necessary to get the console, and once you get market share it'll be worth porting and optimising games for an under-powered console (Celeste, Hollow Knight and probably every game runs worse on the switch, but it's playable). I'm not a gamedev, but it seems that nowadays it's easier than ever to port games since in practice there's fewer architectures around.
For a while Nintendo didn't have a competition in handheld market. If you wanted a handheld gaming device you only had Switch.
Now Steam deck easily competes on fun with Nintendo, because a lot of people have massive decades old steam libraries and constant supply of newest and greatest indie games, and quite a lot of power to play fairly modern titles.
This is hard to compete with because Nintendo likes you to pay for games you've already bought on their platform in past, including old NES and SNES roms (which are super embarassing to ask money for imo).
The only drawback of Steam Deck is that it's a fairly big and bulky.
Buying Switch 2 just for a odd once in every 5 years exclusive Zelda game is a pretty hard sell.
SteamOS is Arch, Bazzite is Fedora if you want a more Fedora experience.
I agree mostly because I find myself playing a lot of smaller games these days, and it's much easier for devs to release and patch their games on Steam than it is a Nintendo platform. They also have a much friendlier refund policy.
For the masses though, a Nintendo system just works. I can hand a Switch to my daughter and know she can play Nintendo games with little bullshit, it's easy to play couch co-op, the parental controls are very solid, etc.
In terms of hardware it's ARM and Nvidia, which is a solid foundation, and Nintendo titles look great without being technically demanding. I fully expect to see a 60 FPS Zelda game that uses DLSS upscaling to look great on my 4K TV. The Steam Deck is somewhat limited by FSR2.
> SteamOS is Arch, Bazzite is Fedora if you want a more Fedora experience.
Oops, edited, thank you!
> I agree mostly because I find myself playing a lot of smaller games these days
Same here, I play mostly indie <$20 games and have a blast doing it. These games would (almost) never launch on the Switch (or any console). Either that or I'm playing games that would never work well on the Switch (like Factorio, yes I know there is a port and I've also tried on my steam deck and it sucks, you need a mouse/keyboard IMHO).
> For the masses though, a Nintendo system just works. I can hand a Switch to my daughter and know she can play Nintendo games with little bullshit, it's easy to play couch co-op, the parental controls are very solid, etc.
Agreed, this is huge, I wouldn't recommend a steam deck to the average person, just tech people mostly.
I’m unaware of any law that would require steam to have a more customer friendly refund policy than Nintendo does, which was the point I was addressing.
Which is also a gray area. I personally am fine with it for older, depreciated consoles. But I won't emulate current gen games unless I'm also buying the game.. especially on the Nintendo platform where the games still have some "magic" to them, compared to the more generic games on other platforms that prioritize graphics over seemingly all other attributes.
Even if you buy the game you need to bypass encryption in order to dump the game data to run it on an emulator. A big part of why Nintendo prevailed in their lawsuit against Yuzu is that they proved the emulator could not be used without extracting encryption keys and bypassing copy protection.
So no, there's no legal way to use a switch emulator. At least not for playing commercial switch games, I guess you could theoretically home brew your own game to play on an emulator.
> A big part of why Nintendo prevailed in their lawsuit against Yuzu is that they proved the emulator could not be used without extracting encryption keys and bypassing copy protection.
Not a lawyer but as I understand it, the case resulted in a settlement and as such no legal determination was made. They didn't prove anything in court and no precedent was set regarding the legality of emulation.
Obviously there isn't a switch 2 emulator yet, and probably will be a while until one is released.
The challenge will not be hardware emulation (if it's a nvidia tegra 2 based SOC that will be easy) but hack the OS/security to make it usable.
So don't expect to play mario kart 9 on your steam deck anytime soon.
Edit: with easy i don't mean that it will not demand a really top of the line computer to run it. But that isn't completely undocumented or custom hardware, like i don't know, ps3 or sega saturn.
Sure, but you cannot play online, though. You can't trade Pokemon for example. Tetris 99 got a lot of play in our house. It heavily depends on what you're chasing.
They have sold millions of faulty joycons (referring to drift), when the solution was already available (hall effect sticks) but it would have cost them an extra $1 per joystick, reselling games that came out in 2010 for $60 today, and using DMCA to bully youtube channels that show videos of their games are some morally reprehensible things from the top of my head.
It does not entitle anyone to pirate their games, but taking your words, Nintendo is not exactly starving either, they could have spent the extra $1 on the joycons to fit them with non drifting sticks. Even if you use their replacement program, you just get another joycon with the same stick.
> Why pay for the Steam Deck, though? Buy it online and claim it never arrived to get a refund.
If you do so, the seller has one less device. If you copy a game, the seller still has the same number of games. Your analogy clearly doesn't work. A better analogy would be possible if we had Star Trek replicators: replicating a full Steam Deck.
> A better analogy would be possible if we had Star Trek replicators: replicating a full Steam Deck.
Well, we literally invented Star Trek replicators for information, and we've seen what happened. If we had Star Trek replicators people would be complaining that replicating food, medicine, etc. is immoral because you should be paying the "original creator" for their intellectual property.
Not defending the length of current US copyright, but as long as we live under capitalism, the people who spend years of their time making the information need to get compensated somehow.
What if you buy the game secondhand, cheaply? My friend got Animal Crossing with their switch for free with a bundle, but they don't like playing the game. This would be much better than paying full price for a game that never will go on sale.
Buying a used game means the original owner can no longer play, and has to repurchase if they want to play as again. The same is not true for emulators
Switch emulation works surprisingly well, but it has its quirks and some titles are barely playable. I love emulation primarily because it's necessary for long-term archival of game libraries, but emulating modern systems is not a super user-friendly process (not to mention the qualms around piracy).
The audience of people that would get a Steam Deck and then emulate Switch games is so small that this is a no-issue for Nintendo. If you can do that you're probably not the target audience to begin with.
One could in theory switch from Steam to Switch platform, rebuying everything. Doesn't make a ton of sense from PC gamer standpoint but that's PC gamer standpoint.
I think that while this sentiment is very real for a lot of folks who are into the Steam Deck, that doesn't mean the Switch doesn't have its own unique advantages.
- The Nintendo software catalog. Sure, you can emulate on the Steam Deck, but it's a chore and far from perfect, and for most people who do it that is piracy.
- The Switch is far less bulky, and has better battery life, less noise. ARM architecture is very well-suited to mobile gaming.
- The docking mechanism is seamless and the dock is included with the device. Games are designed around that functionality specifically, e.g., you won't have controller or display configuration issues on a Switch because it's all pre-configured.
- The price is almost certainly lower.
- You can buy physical game cartridges and resell them, which is a big advantage for fans of physical media.
- The Steam Deck does rely on a lot on its compatibility software with PC games, and while it's mostly a non-issue there it's not by any means a perfect catalog. If you get a Switch, all Switch software is going to work and was made for and tested on a Switch.
I think there's also a certain amount of "jank" to the Steam Deck.
Don't get me wrong it is a super cool console and pushes a lot of boundaries, but you don't really 100% know whether a title is going to run the way you want it to on the steam deck.
The switch is a more curated experience, you can pretty much expect every game to run properly, going to put caveat for very heavy graphic cross platform title like the new Harry Potter game, etc.
Steam has a verification process to determine which games work properly on the Steam Deck. If you follow that then you should have no issues playing your games on a Steam Deck.
I can't buy steam games second hand, and I can't let my kids trade steam games with their friends, and I can't sell a steam game and get some $$ back if I decide I am not likely to play it again.
I have both and they certainly each have their place. The Steam Deck has a much wider variety of games and can handle heavier graphics loads, but it is too heavy to be all that comfortable for handheld use, and the Switch is in my mind the undisputed champion of local multiplayer (more portable controllers, controller connections Just Work, good variety of local multiplayer games, etc).
One might imagine, the design of the games are an intricate part of the companies core competencies. The impressive part is a next generation carrying through with the art.
The only reason I have a Switch is to play Nintendo games. They are only available there, and will continue to be only available on Switch 2. Steam deck offers nothing, by comparison.
The openness (full arch desktop) of the Steam Deck is also awesome while having a great UI that you never have to leave if you don't want to.
EDIT: I mistakenly called it "fedora desktop", my bad