How much will handheld PC gaming impact the Switch's successor?

[Norion]

Kneetos said:

I think the steam deck will impact sales, at least a little bit.
With how expensive everything is getting these days most common customers may only be able to buy 1 system to carry them through a whole generation if not longer.

I was speaking to a friend who was telling me that they got the biggest steam deck model and they had no interest in buying a bigger switch model from Nintendo as it would cost them too much money to own both.

Edit: for me personally, I think it depends mostly on prices, will the next gen switch cost $400+, will Nintendo jump on the $70 game price along with everyone else, will NSO ever be worth the asking price?

I do expect an uptick in people like your friend in the coming years. Not sure how big of an uptick though, currently it feels to me that the lost sales could be as low as a few hundred thousand or as high as a few million for the successor.

Pemalite said:

Handheld PC gaming has been around for years, didn't impact the Switch, so I doubt it will impact the Switch 2.

It is becoming more popular now though which is notable. For a lot of people the Steam Deck will be their first time buying a device for that purpose.

curl-6 said:

About as much as desktop PCs will impact PS5 and Xbox Series, or for that matter PS4/Xbox One before them, and PS3/360 before that...

I'd say the impact desktop PCs have had and will have on consoles like those is massive since if it wasn't an option to play video games on a PC then the only way for tens of millions of people to play games like GTA would be on a console. If that wasn't an option I think the combined Playstation and Xbox sales would be increasing each generation instead of decreasing a bit each time so far. Now there won't be nearly as many handheld PC's being used for gaming compared to desktop ones though of course so the impact on the future of the Switch line will be way smaller but I think it'll increase overtime.