Are PC handhelds like Steam Deck really competitors for Switch 2?

If all of its games were available elsewhere, there would be a lot less switch users

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).
  
  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.
  
  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)
  
  Also Lenovo is releasing a legion go that ships woth steam os. Thay will help push steam os development and adoptions.
- For some actual numbers, Valve had sold ~4 million steam decks since it was released over 3 years ago.
  Nintendo has sold ~150 million switches to date. And they sold nearly 18 million of them in its first full year (2017).

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).
- It's way too big for kids too.
- I picked up a Nintendo Switch because of it being a handheld. I wouldn't have picked one up otherwise, since I had skipped generations of Nintendo consoles preferring Sony due to Nintendo games being too high. But, with the Steam Deck where I don't even need to repurchase "Deck versions" of games the handheld component isn't a selling point of the Switch to me anymore.
- The Ally, Legion, Claw and Win 4 are all more expensive than the Steam Deck. The Odin 2 and Pocket 5 are not, but they don't run steam, so you can definitely not play all the same games as the steam deck
  
  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.
  
  Reparability? Robustness? Software support? Community support?
  It isn't all about comparing performance numbers.
  
  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.
  
  This is exactly why we have these issues like we're dealing with with the Switch 2. Console gamers are only focused on hardware and exclusivity, they're not focused on the operating system of the device, the build quality of the product itself (including the ergonomics), nor do they care about the company that produces it beyond their basic fanboy tendencies.
  Steam Deck's competitors might have slightly better hardware or a higher resolution, but none of them are right to repair friendly. None of them have custom software literally designed for the product, and none of them have the sort of ergonomics that the Steam Deck has. Not to mention the fact that Valve is an American company, which might not be important to everybody, but it is important to me. They're also a company that has proven themselves to be largely consumer-friendly.
  While I'm not dissing anybody who does make the choice to go for an Ally or a Legion Go, the problem I have is that those devices are literally just another hardware company jumping on a band wagon. The Steam Deck completely revolutionized the way that we play on PC. Sure, it took inspiration from the original Switch. There's no question about that. But that doesn't mean that Valve was just jumping on a band wagon the way that ASUS and Lenovo are doing.
  Valve literally spent years working with Linux developers on software that makes Linux gaming truly viable in order to create devices that allow you to run virtually any game on a handheld that you fully own, are allowed to put any game on (including games from other launchers, which they didn't have to allow) and you're fully allowed to self-repair it if any issues arise. Meanwhile, companies like ASUS and Lenovo treat their customers more like smartphone ~~suckers~~ customers, not to mention the fact that they went the cheap and easy route of just using Windows, which isn't optimized for a device like these. And guess what? Lenovo is bending the knee to the Steam Deck supremacy by allowing you to get a version with SteamOS in the future. That alone proves that Valve is one step ahead of their competition.
  To summarize all that I said, the reason the Steam Deck is so good is not just the hardware, it's not just the screen, it's the fact that it's a very capable device at the hardware level, combined with very, very good software and a very consumer-friendly company behind it all.

Do people actually think its a competitor? This is just news sites trying to make something up for clicks surly.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  I'd say its more people stating why they prefer the Steam Deck over the Switch than actually believing the Steam Deck would overtake the Switch. Challenge them to a bet and you'd see very few take it.
  I think it is people mistaking people's preferences for market share predictions.
- You can go on random comment section on internet, and people are starting new "console war" for Steam Deck vs Nintendo Switch.

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 (EDIT: also, Game Pass, the thing Microsoft is surely going to hammer home most). 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.
  
  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.
- Direct input existed before xinput and works just fine

Yes because Steamdeck games are cheaper
- And a lot of people already have hundreds of them
- They won't be cheaper for long...
  
  Sure they will, Steam has sales all the time

Is a pants really a competitor for clothing?
- Wouldn't the switch (locked down) be pants and pc handhelds (anything) be clothing?
  
  Yes? That's the analogy. Did they flip it in the article maybe
- Trick question, there's no "a pants"

There's some overlap in customers, sure but the vast majority of people who buy a Switch 2 aren't the types who would buy a Deck. Switch 2 will sell tens of millions more units to a mainstream consumer. And that's fine. Deck can still be a successful product in its own right as long as Valve is making a profit off of it through Steam software sales.
- Yep they can both be in the same space.

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.
  
  Yes but that group by in large won't be buying a switch 2 for at least a couple of years. $450 per console plus $80 a game is brutal, especially if you're buying for more than one kid.
  On the other hand a switch lite can be had for like $100 and used games aren't too expensive either. So for the price of a switch 2 you could get all 3 kids a switch lite + a game. No fucking brainer.
  The sort of people who bought a switch at launch, after drinking Nintendo NX leaks like kool-aid, aren't as impressed this time around. They're also getting really pissed off at Nintendo's behavior towards the emulation scene.
  Lots of those people, myself included, will be getting a steam deck. A lot of us will also probably end up buying a switch later on after sales/price drops/cheaper revisions. The same time most parents will be snatching them up.
  Lifetime sales won't be affected nearly as hard, but I don't know that the first year will be as big as the OG switch's.
  That being said if M$ can figure out a good UI for windows portables W/ Xbox integration that might make things even harder for them.
  
  Idiots who have never used a steam deck and are obviously scared by the word linux in this thread. You can easily use the steamdeck without ever leaving gaming mode and with absolutely no troubleshooting needed. Its as simple as browsing steam, pressing download, and pressing play. I would absolutely give it to a child with a few games preloaded, and they would be perfectly fine to use it. The UI is way more friendly than the switch one also. Everytime ive tried to play a game on switch with friends theres been some update that takes ages, the Ui is slow and clunky, and connecting joycons is an absolute pain. What troubleshooting do you think is necessary to run a game from steam lmao?
- 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

After playing tens of games on the Switch people might want to play the tens of thousands of games on Steam.

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.
  
  With no PS5 the only games that make sense to build for PCs are targeting integrated graphics and lowest-common-denominator CPUs.
  Are we just ignoring all of the PC-exclusive games PS5 players will never get to play? And the games that were PC-exclusive until their success prompted a console port? The PC catalog dwarfs the PS5 catalog by hundreds of modern titles, and thousands if you count retro games. Steam (just one of the PC software distribution platforms) added over 14,000 games in the last year and there are fewer than 3,500 PS5 games in total. I can tell you that "targeting integrated graphics and lowest-common-denominator CPUs" has never really been a priority in the PC space; you can see this trend even before consoles like the SNES existed.
  That's why PC games in the 2000s used to look like World of Warcraft even though PCs could do Crysis.
  A lot of PCs couldn't do Crisis. It was a hardware seller because a lot of people significantly upgraded just to play it. Games in the 2000s looked like that because highly-detailed 3D polygonal models used too many resources (mostly CPU at the time). It made more sense, for developer and user, to limit the polygon count for everyone's sake.
  Even in the modern day, World of Warcraft is an MMO and the textures and other assets are deliberately less detailed to optimize performance, so this isn't really a fair comparison and doesn't really demonstrate that consoles prop up the PC market (especially since WoW wasn't available for consoles during the peak of its success and was also a hardware seller due to that exclusivity). It's like comparing Plants vs. Zombies and Half-Life 2, or Destiny and Alien: Isolation.
  
  PC gaming is much bigger now.
  One such article that discussed the revenue change. https://wccftech.com/pc-gaming-brought-in-significantly-higher-revenue-than-consoles-in-the-last-decade/
  But if we are talking about pure revenue, mobile game blows both PC and console out of the water.
  I suppose saying that consoles don't matter altogether is disingenuous to the conversation. They matter less now should be the correct statement.
  
  You’re objectively wrong.

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.
  
  that model of the Deck has a ... worse CPU
  We don't really know this. It is 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.).
  While we don't have detailed info on the Switch 2 CPU, the original Switch CPU was three generations behind at the time of the console's release.

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?
  
  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)_/¯
  
  I mean the hardware is at least decent. And they aren't shitting out another one because they aren't seeing the generation improvement in performance they wanted (its coming). If I buy a Steam Deck, I at least get capable hardware.
  Nintendo last several generations of hardware are born anemic. They start behind where even close to the cutting edge is. Nintendo has long since gave up pushing any kind of interesting boundary with its hardware.
  I can't just download "SwitchOS" and throw it on some non-anemic hardware to get a decent experience.
  As much as people want to project onto Steam the idea that its a walled garden, its not. It is a cultivated garden, but its not walled off. You can enter and leave freely.

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.
- This is very true. It's not just that Nintendo makes good games, it's that a lot of their games are wildly unlike anything else on the market. The reason I'm losing my mind over a Kirby Air Ride sequel is because there hasn't been any other game like the original from 2003. I've waited 22 years for another game that could scratch that itch.
- The steam deck can play literally any Mario Kart except for MK World...

Well, the steam deck sold something like 6 million, and the switch sold 150 million, so....probably not? But on a more anecdotal level I know a lot of people for whom the Steam Deck took the place of their Switch.

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.

Betteridge wins again.
Handhelds are a niche in PC gaming. Especially in the whole gaming market.

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.
- Isn't that precisely the point of the steam deck, it provides a console-like target for game devs to develop against.
  
  Yes, to an extent, which is positive. I don't know too much about the steam deck side of things, but I don't get the impression that it's got enough PC market share to do that. I have a steam controller and last time I used that (admittedly years ago when it was still pretty new) I found Steam Input really didn't have good defaults at all, despite what they said. The only sort of good defaults had the drawback of just ignoring most of the device's USPs. It was bad, and community profiles weren't good either. Maybe it got better?
- 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].

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.

Nintendo consoles are locked down, solely designed to force you to spend top dollar on the latest Bing-Bing-Wahoo games and late capitalism subscriptions so you can play with children and manchildren alike. You get the choice to buy BingKart Horizon for $80-90, or buy the old Switch 1 games again, full price, because they didn't want to bother releasing a 5MB update to unlock the framerates and resolution in the original ones. Nintendo wants more money, fuck you, pay more.
Steam Deck is effectively a gaming PC crammed into a handheld. It uses an open OS that you don't have to root, so you can install almost every game humanity has ever made, including all the previous Bing-Bing-Wahoos. You can get any of these games for FREE (if you're smart), or just wait for a fire sale held several times a year. We can vaguely count on someone eventually developing an emulator to work with Switch 2 games one day, saving everyone money in the long run, because those angel developers that operate against the wishes of corporate gaming cartel oppressors are the closest thing we have to Santa Claus and Jesus doing a fusion dance. The Steam Deck is how we forgive Gaben for never releasing HL3. Exclusively played by giga-manchildren.

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

Yes, when combined with the switch 1
I keep retyping what I want to say, but I think my feelings come down to:
There are 150 million switch 1's in the wild, that's going to continue to be a massive pull for developers when porting new games.
Many families may already have the switch 1, are the exclusives enough of a pull to encourage those people to upgrade?
I do think the switch 2 will do just fine, but I also think there are a lot of people who loved their switch 1 who might look at the games they played, and look at upgrading to a steamdeck instead of the switch 2.

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.

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 list of games like that is now almost exclusively consists of competitive shooters, and you wouldn't even think 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.

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.

"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.
  
  Yes, that's why they took an ARM based Tegra (like the vita with the powerVR from imagination tech) unlike the in-house wiiu tech... Why look at evidence when we can ignore it and just BS to defend my fav plastic box maker...
  Also, the WiiU is basically the PSP remote play in one package, 6y later...
  C'mon man, do Nintendo fanboys really have to ape Apple fanboys for everything. Next thing you're going to tell me how palworld should be sued to the ground...
- The Vita had far more problems than just memory cards. You came very close to identifying what the real problem was, Sony couldn't sustain supporting two separate platforms at once. And conversely, Nintendo unifying onto a single platform was what saved the Switch.

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.

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.

No they are not mutually exclusive
- Mine actually emulates switch games.

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.
  
  Its not specifically hard but its also not just as easy to use. I say this as someone whos been gaming on linux for over a decade now. You still run into issues here and there with proton(often a devs fault for bad code) and there is genuinely a lot more going on and tweakable on the steamdeck.
  Steamdeck is a great device but Nintendo is good at making simple systems
- I don’t see the problem with having both- they fill different niches.
  Money. Steam Deck OLED costs in my country €700, Switch OLED €350-360 and the Switch 2 will be around the €560-600.
  steam deck, I’d be really sad to not have any Mario kart, Zelda, etc…
  I’m so close on purchasing a Steam Deck OLED to game in weekends or in bed after full 5 days behind a desk job. But I’m always worried that these games won’t work well with emulations. I’ve been researching like crazy but keep reading different things.
  And spending €700 with uncertainty is not my favorite thing to do.
  
  I really doubt switch 2 games will emulate at all or well for quite some time.
  I get the money argument. In that case, get the one that does more for you now now, and save up for the other one later. You don’t need them all at once.
  I waited a year before getting the first switch, and almost 2 years for a ps4. I think I waited at least a year for all the other PlayStations too save the 5.
  Getting something at launch isn’t all that great- bugs, limited games, max prices, etc… a year or so later and you get bundles and deals and lots of game choices.
  I don’t have a deck- but a few of my friends do and I’ve played with it a bit- it’s great and I want one at some point, but I can wait for #2 to come out and then go on sale before I dive in.
  
  Haha, I am researching like crazy as well. So far I came to the conclusion that I have 3 options:
  get a Steam Deck
  get a Lenovo Legion Go (more power but less battery life)
  wait and see what will Lenovo Legion Go 2 be like
  So far I'm waiting. My current Switch isn't going anywhere, but going forward I'm not going to spend much on games there.

No, they are successors.

The real question is: Do I care? And the answer is no. No I do not.

Within an enthusiast bubble, PC handhelds are a big deal, but they do not exist in the same universe as Nintendo consoles.
I keep hearing this shit and it seems like stupid wishful thinking, because in a locked-down universe where Switch 2 is not a shitty proposition for way too much cash compared to getting a PC with 10k+ PC games from the get go and also emulating anything you wish because it's your hardware and it's just bits - in that universe, Polygon is a much needed pool of experts that people go to for advice instead of a source of stupid ragebait titles telling them a log of shit is the new snickers.
Nintendo will not have true competition in handhelds until its peers in the console space get involved.
Yeah, sure, fuck you Polygon

No. They aren't available widespread enough off the Internet, not marketed enough, too heavy. Maybe a hypothetical future Switch 2 and Switch Lite