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.

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[–] joshhsoj1902@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

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.

[–] Viri4thus@feddit.org 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (6 children)

"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.

[–] missingno@fedia.io 4 points 2 weeks ago

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.

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[–] Etterra@discuss.online 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] WarlordSdocy@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] ekZepp@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] WarlordSdocy@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] GooberEar@lemmy.wtf 4 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] warm@kbin.earth 4 points 2 weeks ago

No, they are successors.

[–] carl_dungeon@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] Montreal_Metro@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

No they are not mutually exclusive

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