Keep moving goalposts. Don't talk to me with your bullshit. Stop quoting every fucking person in this topic who doesn't worship this thing like you do.

Yea I think it mainly comes down to if a PC gamer wants to buy a handheld, their options are either paying $300 for a Switch or paying $800+ for a PC handheld from China like the GPD Win series. I think most would choose the Switch because $800 is not only a very high asking price, the idea that if anything went wrong, I'd have to ship it back to China assuming their customer support is decent is very essh. It's certainly why I own a Switch instead.

Now you have a third option starting at $399 and backed by Valve who you know is a legit company. I am not saying this will be a switch killer or anything but it has me very excited.

Sure, but the Switch does a lot of things the Steam Deck doesn't. I actually have used the detachable joycons with multiple players on many occasions. It's not the best controller, but it's perfectly serviceable for most games. More importantly than being useful for the Switch in handheld mode is the fact that it is usable in docked mode. This means you can play two player games out of the box, whereas with the Steambox you will need to have a separate controller to play even single player games in docked mode. I'm guessing most people have something that they can use for games in docked mode (at least a mouse and keyboard), but it may not be ideal, may not be plug and play, and they may not have enough for multiple players. Particularly for less tech savvy people, it's going to be a far clumsier solution that the Switch's quick and easy transition from handheld to docked or one players to two.

It also does motion out of the box. Something like Ring Fit could easily work on the Steamdeck but would probably require a more expensive add on. Motion controls aren't huge on the Switch but I like them and I'm guessing I'm not alone.

Switch also is a closed ecosystem which obviously has some drawbacks but also has some advantages, mainly that you can be fairly confident it will run every Switch game, whereas it remains to be seen how well the Steamdeck will run things, and if it will be running modern games 3-4 years from now at playable levels. The Switch also can fit comfortably in a pocket (at least a man's pocket) whereas the Steam deck would likely require a carrying case. Switch also has better battery life, which is largely because games are targeted towards the Switch and run at lower quality.

Most importantly, the Switch has access to Nintendo's first party library. Maybe the Steamdeck will be powerful enough to run games smoothly. And that's probably the biggest reason people buy Nintendo systems.

Steamdeck may have access to it illegitimately, but we'll have to wait till its released to see if it could emulate Switch games well and how that impacts power consumption. The above video of Mario Odyssey running looks pretty rough and that's not the most demanding game, or even the most demanding part of that game. Even to the extent that it runs Nintendo games, there are drawbacks. Will you be able to play Splatoon 2online? I'm sure there's some way to make that possible but unless there's a really dedicated community like with Melee, there's unlikely to be a satisfying way to do that. And even though Melee matches online run better than Ultimate, it's still a bit of a chore to get to an online match, which is probably a bit too much effort for your average gamer.

So, yeah, Steamdeck does things the Switch doesn't. You can say that about more or less any two products that aren't identical or at least incredibly similar. The things it does probably aren't the things that are driving Switch owners. It may find its own market, but if the things Steambox did were that important to Switch owners, the Switch probably wouldn't be that successful in the first place.

Is this a meme of some sort ?

Congrats to software pirates?

Most people don't know how to mod and/or how to download illegal software.  Hence this won't compete with the switch.  But you knew that already.

You're the one that moved them mate.

Don't get uppity when you've no need to be, or in a thread you didn't care for in the first place.

I'm not even asking folks to worship the damn thing, I just think it's stupid to pull the whole "physical>digital" argument, when we both know that both manage to co-exist, and digital is just as viable, if not growing exponentially. 

You also didn't care to want to buy the damn thing, so why on earth would you care to toss out an argument like that at all?.

Notice there are other people in here I haven't quoted that didn't make one liners like yours?.

The 399 point is pretty gimped by the storage though, and the GPD Win also comes with windows 10 installed (which costs $120 to activate) The ultimate GDP win version comes with 1tb SSD (replaceable), still costs less than my gaming laptop. Its cpu is faster, but less cores and the GPU is much slower. But probably enough for 720p.

Anyway, by the time you have the steam deck gimped out with 1tb storage and windows 10, you're probably looking at $800 as well.

You can get Windows 10 for free from MS officially and it will run without any issues. 1TB SSD costs maybe $200.

But the key here is the entry price point. If a person is going for the $399 price point, they already know what they are getting into. And MicroSD for the majority of PC games isn't a bad option if they don't mind waiting for the load times as most games including a number of AAA games as they are optimized for slow console hard drives which the MicroSD might be able to handle as the read speeds are the important factor. Hopefully DF or someone will do extensive testing soon enough though but we do have some examples from youtubes that tested this. Also Valve themselves said when IGN was testing the Deck, the games were running off of the MicroSD card.

If the Deck is able to sell well enough to sell at a profit, then maybe Nintendo will look at it. Otherwise, they probably did enough R&D and determined taking a more powerful chip wasn’t the route to go for now, considering what’s happening around the industry regarding supplies of parts for consoles. Nintendo likely wants to increase their profit margins with the Switch OLED.

The Steam Deck will do things the Switch is not able to do, but it’s also true vice versa.

The $200 Switch Lite and the $300 Switch V.2 are selling fine. With their price point, I don’t see how they can be affected by a $400 low end version of the Steam Deck that doesn’t have a dock. Heck, the Xbox Series S, so far, hasn’t done much to affect Switch sales at $300.

Most indies run fine on Switch, even most third party ports. Of course, Steam has about every game on Earth outside of most Sony and all of the Nintendo games (not emulated of course). Plus, would emulation really be a selling point for those who play games more casually and don’t know much about emulation? Not to mention, the Nintendo’s first party Switch games are the main attraction for getting a Switch. If emulation is affecting sales of their big first party games on Switch, then maybe they’ll do something about it. But as of now, from what I’ve seen, emulation of Switch games still has a long way to go to be considered comparable (or better) than being played natively on Switch.

Also. retail is still important to maintain a presence among casual consumers. There are physical games and the Switch console itself on store shelves.

I almost forgot about Japan. I don’t know about the PC community (or Steam community) in Japan, but the Switch is a monster in Japan. Even the PS5 is not able to break into that bubble. You probably have seen the software sales of the PS5 in Japan (let alone the hardware sales) on the weekly discussion of the Japanese sales charts. Heck, it goes back to the PS4. The PS4 had all the big AAA Japanese games in existence and the majority of the smaller titles from Japan. It basically had every element to dominate Japan except two, portability and Nintendo games. Frankly enough, the Switch needed just those two elements just to fly by the PS4 in sales. Could the Steam Deck breakthrough in Japan? Hard to tell.

The Steam Deck appears to aim towards a different audience that the Switch is aiming towards. I’m sure the Steam Deck will do fine, but I think it’ll take more than being a more powerful, but more expensive, handheld to suddenly divert attention away from Switch in a general consumer point of view.

It really on takes watching a 3-4 minute video on Youtube these days. I remember back in the day how widespread Playstation piracy was and you have to actually soder the mod chip onto the board, but there was a massive market around doing that but people in the 90s were making due. 

DS piracy being quite widespread as the device aged, I think that was a big part of the reason Nintendo wanted to move on to the 3DS. 

Piracy/emulation is inevitably a problem if you want to keep using tech that is very outdated as time goes on, it become easy for piracy to become a problem. 

So I wouldn't say it's so complex that you have to be some kind of computer nerd to figure it out, it's not that hard to install an emulator on a PC. 

I don't know if this one specific model is the be all end, but I can see this doing well enough that Valve keeps iterating other models and eventually starts selling them in major retailers. And I could see other manufacturers trying their hand too, making it kind of like its own product category (Switch like portable PCs). This model is more like the genie coming out of the bottle, but once the genie is out, it's hard to put it back in.